No need! All I have to say is WUW. Freaking WUW! Yesterday I played with my hand ascender/foot loop with gmcttr's HAAS and ropewrench on my skinny dynamic rope. As you all probably guessed it sucked. The rope wouldn't work well with any of the hitches, I had like a thousand shock cords connecting everything to my jacket, and it sucked learning to move my hand up before I could move my foot.
HOWEVER! After Reed explained to me the big difference that an actual foot ascender makes I decided to convert my hand ascender into a foot ascender which was actually not that hard. So this time I set up my static rope, found a hitch that locked up really well (thanks for the vid YoYoman!), then rigged up the HAAS with my hand-to-foot ascender conversion. I also just learned a cool trick from Tom which is to girth hitch a throwbag at the bottom of the line for easy feeding (THANKS TOM!). As I started climbing I was watching how everything worked then WAMMY! I was suddenly at my TIP 30 feet up!?
I am pretty psyched at how fast this system climbs but I am definitely not used to trusting my life to a friction hitch. If it fails to catch then I free fall (as compared to a grigri that fails to cam I can still control the descent like a traditional rock climb rappel). Either way I am having a lot of fun with all the gear. I am gonna go find a big tree down in a valley near my house. I have no doubt that I will find some big old cottonwoods!
