3D Printed Stick Clip for Climbing

Since returning to Slovakia I have been enjoying the summer after my undergrad by climbing all around the place. With many new climbing achievements, came new climbing challenges. Luckily climbing is a prevalent pastime activity in Slovakia, especially sport climbing, making the climbing quite streamlined. Due to this many crags around here are frequently re-bolted and bolted incredibly safely with glue-in bolts, unlike many crags around the United States (thanks to the courtesy of SHS JAMES).  

So it came as a surprise when my friends and I took a trip to a very classic crag in central Slovakia
called Kalamárka and the bolting for some climbs was, dare I say, old-school.

When talking to the local climbers they informed us that it is a place where they value fewer bolts and prefer to utilize Cams, Nuts, and Tri-Cams in many climbs for safety as the character of the stones allows for their use. Having said that, the crag was re-bolted a few years ago and is now much safer to climb at with many new bolts appearing in climbs. Even with this new re-bolting, some climbs still remain quite brave ... check out this grade 5 climb (4b / 5.7) that I did while we were there.

First bols circled in red

Since the first section was a relatively easy slab climb with a shelf right below the bolt, the placement was not too much of an issue. However, it got me thinking ...  I might need a stick clip! Since I am not the shortest climber I usually solve this issue as follows:

Clipping the first bolt on Road Crew in Holcomb Valley

Shoutout my friend Charlotte. But this method also has its limits, and it sure as hell is not practical. Due to this, I decided to create my own stick clip.

With coming back home came access to a workshop and a 3D printer so I MacGyvered the following contraption. When designing this stick clip I made a couple design choices that were fitting to my situation which might not suit you and your local crags. Firstly I will say a lot of the hard work was done by Rodrigo Motta whose stick clip design I downloaded from Thingaverse and altered to fit my situation better. This design was perfect because I did not actually need the stick part of the stick clip as all of the sport climbing crags in Slovakia are either in a forest or by a forest. If you do not know, forests are some of the most plentiful places for finding sticks and therefore I could just create a clipping part and attach it to a stick I find on location. As a climber I also happen to be in possession of an action sports camera under the name GoPro which comes with a mount that attaches to drumroll please ... you guessed it, sticks. So I altered the design by adding a male GoPro bracket to the body of the  stick clip.

Final Design

The dimensions of the project are made to fit a standard size quickdraw and a female GoPro camera mount so there is no need to change the size. I would recommend increasing the wall width and the infill percentage as the male GoPro bracket mount needs to be strong enough to carry the weight of a standard quickdraw as well as the weight of the length of rope to the first bolt (2x because one side is attached to you and one will be resting on the ground). In case you are using an Edelrid Ohm the weight is even greater.

After printing I cleaned the print from all supports and added the wire needed to hold the quickdraw gate open when clipping the first bolt. I used a miscellaneous 2 mm wire we had in the garage, threaded it through the hole in the center of the design, bent it into the needed shape and then trimmed the access using normal pliers (you might need to use your whole weight for this one ... 2mm wire is tougher than it seems). There were no precise measurements during the trimming of the wire, I just bent it to be an U-Shape that contoured the sides of the print and then bent one of the sides inward to hold the gate open making sure to keep the gap between the bends of the wires wide enough so the back side of the quickdraw could pass through with ease. The length of the wire keeping the gate open is the rough distance to the end of the wire gate when it is 50% open (see final product for reference).

Shape of the wire

The final steps were to file down the rough cut edges of the wire and attach a GoPro stick mount. With that here is the final product.

And here is how it looks with a quickdraw in place.

And a video of me testing it out.

So that's how I printed my stick clip! (stick not included) Hope this helps and have fun climbing hard projects! Message me if you'd like to print your own and I can send you the .stl file!