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Gerald Wood (inventor of the 8-link knot) invented the whaletail and published the design in the December 1967 NSS News, but quickly denied responsibility for naming the device. He was aware of John Cole's rappel rack, but he had concerns over heat dissipation (strangly, he preferred Patten's J-bar to the rack). The Whaletail addresses the heat issue very well, at the expense of being somewhat heavy.
Gerald and his friends were concerned about whether the rope could come out of the whaletail, but after extensive testing, concluded that the rope could only come out if they shortened the guards. Alas, they were wrong. A friend of mine had the rope come out of a whaletail as he started down the 155 m. Fantastic Pit in Ellisons Cave, putting him into freefall. The incident ended happily as he attached an ascender to the rope on the way down, but this incident combined with continued concerns over the whaletail's safety led to its demise in the USA. The Austrailians adopted the whaletail for a while, after sensibly adding a safety gate.
I made a copy of Gerald Wood's whaletail in 2008. Made from 6061-T6 aluminum, it is 252 mm. tall, 60 mm. wide, 20 mm. thick, and weighs 624 g.
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The
Spelean Whaletail is the earliest commercial whaletail in my collection.
It is cast from aluminum, and has a single safety gate.
The friction on a whaletail can be varied by changing the number
of bars in use; however, since the bar spacing is fixed, this
is not feasible at the top of a long dop where only the top bars
are in use (configuration #1). In addition, the bars cannot be
jammed together like they can on a rack, so that mode of stopping
is not available. On the other hand, the whaletail dissipates
heat better than a standard rack, is slightly faster to rig, and
is much stronger.
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Neil Montgomery described the Spelean whaletail in Nylon Highway #7, and included a drawing with dimensions. I converted the dimensions from millimeters to inches, and had this whaletail made. It is milled from 6061-T6 aluminum, so it is quite solid. It is 280 mm. tall, 72 mm. wide, 25 mm. thick, and weighs 710 g. Although it is heavy, I've used it caving a number of times, and it has worked well. (It also works for driving tent stakes.)
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