If you use each ATC as a passive pro, you can protect a whole pitch with them lol, then have extra for belaying

I just got the Mammut one too since my local sandstone shreds gear. Using the grivel plume HMS twingate has low friction belaying in guide mode (saving my shoulders and elbows which hurt every season) although I rap with the edelrid bulletproof to not kill the little plume.

Beal makes a guide mode tuber that has grooves on both sides. One with teeth, one without teeth. That way you avoid the sharp edge from the rope eating the back side of the tuber on rappels.

You are a huge help, I love your videos. You are providing answers and detail to things I haven’t seen in books or covered by other channels. Every time time I see a new video I get excited because I know I am going to walk away with a better understanding of something!

Let the history lessons begin! I love it.

Adding to the rope range rant: the thin side of the spec usually is for double ropes not single. You have to really look up for that information if you want to know the thinnest single rope you should be belaying with (from below). The reverso if I recall correctly takes 8.5mm while the atc guide perhaps 8.7mm

The giga jul is up to 10.0 mm ropes. Good luck with belay from above with a 10 mm rope. Even 9.5 mm single ropes aren't fun with this thing in belay from above.

You should check out the Beal Air Force 3. It's a guide style tube device and it has the V-shape in the front and back of the rope slots. This is to prevent sharp edges from forming when the rope wears it down. I really like it.

Hey Ryan, thank you for the nice overview! Have you heard about the new Edelrid Nano Jul? It's made of stainless steel and has quiet grabby teeth, what I prefer for my half ropes. Could be worth for you to check out, as I think it's gonna hold a long time. Cheers from Switzerland, Andi

Have you tried turning the devices around to reduce friction? E.g. the GigaJul has way less friction when turned around in manual mode and it's the same for my ATC from BD.

Omg ryan love your stuff but we dont have 30 min to dive thru unsorted stuff, please add timestamps or give the tldr beta

Puzzled why you would continually need to break in new devices. Since you carry multiple devices, why not use one broken-in guide-mode device forever ? As far as I can tell, guide mode doesn't wear out anything that you wouldn't want worn for that use. It feels wasteful to keep breaking in new devices, as that limits their usefulness for other things like lead belaying. One explanation I can imagine is your ropes are too thin to comfortably rappel in low-friction mode, so you have to wear out *something*. But if that's the case, why not use cheaper non-guide-mode devices for rappelling ?