The one he is using and shows on his website was 3D printed. For sure you can make one that way, most anything that can be molded from plastic can be printed and today’s printers can use a really wide variety of plastics.
I have every intention. I've got two more competitions to fund this year, but as soon as the extra hundred pops up, I'll be sending it to Richard Mumford. Then I'm getting on this wait list.
Then that sounds like a project for some locust heartwood. You could have as few toes as you need and make them just the right size for your preferred long lanyard.
It does stick out a bit, AJ, but not really much further than other stuff often hanging off our saddles, (like my water bottle, CariTool, etc). In fact the old way of double daisying my big lanyard was equally bulky and obstructive. The thing is, the toes are long enough to be flexible so they bend and allow one to insert or remove the coils but spring back to grip them. If we shorten the toes, they would not flex and release nearly as well. This abillity to grip the coils and keep them secure til needed is one of the secrets of the gadget. I suppose if a Gecko was made of a softer and more flexible material, the toes could be shortened to hold just one wrap? But as it is, each toe holds exactly two wraps of rope which is cool. Depending on the diameter of the coils, a Gecko can soak up a lot of rope; and I also found it works fairly well, if I organize the wraps a certain way, for the lanyard to still be used double ended. I screwed this Gecko permanently to the side of the saddle so a design challenge would be to make the entire rig quickly removable to suit individual climbs, like you mentioned about squeezing thru tight spots in certain types of trees, or for when you might want to quickly swap it and its lanyard to a different saddle or climber. (Those of you who are not addicted tinkerers are so fortunate. This kind of pondering keeps me awake half the night starring at the ceiling!)
