Strangely enough, the humble beginnings of Salt Lake City-based climbing and skiing gear manufacturer Black Diamond can’t be traced to some snow-choked mountain hamlet or crag-loaded Front Range town. In its earliest days, the company, known then as Chouinard Equipment, was run out of a ramshackle tin machine shack in surf-crazy Ventura, California, where Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard forged iron pitons with little more than a hammer and an anvil.
After the company’s demise at the hands of several lawsuits in 1989, current CEO Peter Metcalf and others purchased the assets, relaunched the business as Black Diamond, and moved east to Utah.
Now a dominant presence in both the climbing and backcountry ski markets and on track to turn $100 million a year, BD occupies a quaint, Bavarian-style campus in a sleepy Salt Lake City neighborhood, which houses both its head offices and a portion of manufacturing. Filled with hardcore types who spend their free time hiking for turns in Wasatch powder or cranking 5.13’s at the local cliffs, Black Diamond is perhaps best known for its carabiners, found on climber’s racks from Yosemite to the Alps.
Such a simple metal clip can be a deceivingly complex piece of engineering, and the crew at BD spends months, sometimes years designing, testing, and crafting each new carabiner. I made a visit to HQ and got a peek at the journey of a new design, from the initial computer drawings to its eventual life on the rock and ice faces of the world.
Design
“Whenever you design something, it starts with a need,” says Bill Belcourt, BD’s Climbing Hardgoods Category Director. The BD carabiner that eventually ends up on a climber’s rack begins as a brainstorming session or a simply sketched idea in the design department. Product designers determine what they want the carabiner to do and look like, and from there, they design computer models. Before they physically make anything, the design team uses FEA (Finite Element Analysis), which helps determine the shapes, angles, and features needed to fulfill the company’s strength requirements.
After the designers nail down a design they are satisfied with, machinists computer mill a batch of prototypes from single pieces of aluminum, a labor-intensive process that sometimes costs upward of $200 per prototype. These functional prototypes then head up to the Quality Assurance team for lab and field testing. “It’s an expensive process to get the shapes you ultimately see at retail, but it’s a necessary thing,” Belcourt says.
Testing
Black Diamond’s testing lab, headed by Director of Global Quality Kolin Powick, looks like a cross between a climber’s wet dream and a mad scientist’s laboratory. Prototype ski boot shells, snapped ice tool shafts, twisted carabiners, and torn slings are strewn about the office and lab areas, a standing testament to the rigorous tests that Powick and his team put each piece of gear through. “For every test that the CE (a European consumer safety certification) requires, we probably have another dozen tests that we do internally that we require,” Belcourt says.
The QA team puts the prototypes through tests on every conceivable aspect, trying to find any design flaws they can, says Powick. Over time, QA collaborates with the designers to tweak the prototypes until they get satisfying results in both the lab and the field.
One of the team’s main tests involved a tensile-strength testing machine, which uses separating clamps to simulate weighted force until the carabiner fails. A computer readout then tells the engineers at what force the ’biner failed and where.
I watched as Powick loaded a Quicksilver Screwgate carabiner into the machine and it slowly stretched like taffy, until it fractured with a startling snap at around 6,200 pounds of force. According to Powick, when a new design comes through, they’ll prototype, test, and break hundreds of carabiners from design to production.
“People’s lives are on the line, so we put a lot of effort into getting it right,” Powick says. “I joke that my mom asks me what I do, and I tell her I make sure my friends don’t die.”
Production
After a design has gone through meticulous lab and field testing by both Powick’s team and BD’s pro athletes, and has passed the necessary external certifications, a green-lighted design is ready for a full production run.
Downstairs, in the company’s industrial underbelly, towering machines hiss and stamp amid countless bins of extruded parts and raw materials. In the corner, sparks fly as a computerized saw cuts out crampon spikes and ice tool blades. Although the company splits its manufacturing between Salt Lake and its Asia outpost, production of its most technical gear remains here in the US. Both facilities are BD-owned and are operated with the same QA policies, testing, and certifications, says BD’s creative director Matt Law.
Raw material comes in the form of two sizes of aluminum rod stock, and an enormous purple machine affectionately referred to as Barney cuts and bends the stock into shape. Barney then spits the shaped rods into plastic bins, where they wait for either the hot- or cold-forging machines, depending on which model of carabiner it is. Hot forging allows for more radical shapes and can move material easier, making it ideal for progressive or ultralight carabiners, explains Law. The process is more expensive and the variation in strength is higher than traditional cold forging, but some designs require it to achieve the necessary shape or strength-to-weight ratio. Each ’biner is stamped into shape, and the extra material is then trimmed and recycled.
After forging, all ’biners move on to be heat treated, which hardens the aluminum to the ideal strength. The BD crew loads the raw metal onto homemade steel racking systems, and slides the racks into a giant industrial oven that looks more like a nuclear fallout shelter stamped with the trademark double-diamond logo.
Taking a cue from the company’s blacksmithing roots, most of the tooling and manufacturing equipment in the BD factory, like these large metal racks, is custom-made by the company. In addition, engineers build a specialized machining tool for every new design that comes through. “It’s part of our heritage,” says sales rep Brad Barlage. “You can’t buy this kind of manufacturing equipment.”
The pressed and hardened ’biners then head to tumbling and polishing, where they’re loaded into giant spinning containers filled with corn husk, small stones, or other buffing medium, depending on the product. These machines, each of which look like a cross between a concrete tumbler and a hobby-store rock polisher, remove surface cracks and manufacturing residue from the carabiners, giving them a fresh, shiny exterior.
For the finishing touches, the ’biners ship out for anodizing (a protective, color finish) or go straight to the assembly line, where benches of workers drill small holes, attach the gates, and secure the rivets. Workers press, secure, and smooth the rivets, and perform visual and manual tests to make sure the rivets and gate action are smooth. Each ’biner is then loaded on to a conveyor, where another tensile machine tests it to half its rated strength. From here each carabiner gets a certification stamp, and is ready for shipping to retail outlets around the world.
Testing doesn’t end with production, however, and the QA team batch tests every carabiner, cam, and chock during every step of manufacturing. “You can’t just quality-control in quality at the very final inspection,” Belcourt says. “You need to be doing it at every phase along the way.”
As climbing gear continues to get lighter and stronger, finding new designs and materials is key to staying ahead of the curve. BD will often sink tens of thousands of dollars into R&D for products that never make it to market. But the company’s innovative designs like the Camalot, the wiregate carabiner, and its new line of ski boots are what make it one of the most trusted names in the industry.
“It seems like innovation doesn’t happen in a linear fashion, Belcourt says. “Things flatten out for a while, and then leaps come along. We’re working on the leaps.”
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