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Tobia
Social climber
GA
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Jun 12, 2010 - 05:29pm PT
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The only ice I have ever used this axe on was either frozen red clay on wheels of my truck or in a bird bath... that is just about all you would use it for in GA.
I am posting it here hoping a certain lurker from the Tahoe area will recognize it. It looks just like it did 28 years or so ago when he gave it to me after a summer in the meadows.
He must have used it extensively from the wear on it and the brazed repair. I don't know if it is a Chouinard-Frost or not; the name would be stamped right where the repair was made. His name is carved in the handle on the other side and I will put it up later if he doesn't bite.
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Jun 13, 2010 - 12:02am PT
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The adze looks to be cupped which would rule out anything Chouinard. Well used tool though!
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RDB
Social climber
way out there
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Jun 13, 2010 - 12:18am PT
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Steve, I'd bet the axe above is a Stubia, serrate adze gives it away. Good droop in the pick would make it a Everest Ralling (likely) or a Nanga Parbat. It should be marked. Tobia?
Mike, with due respect, I don't think the Bradley comments are the end all in historical accuracy. Looks more like a sales pitch to off load over priced axes.
2nd soft cover catalog in '76 offered Rexilon piolets. Which means the rexilon was out way before the '76 printing. I know they were available winter of '75/'76 because my partner had one! By the fall of '78 the Chouinard bamboo Piolets were gone in the US and Europe. They weren't strong enough to meet the UIAA standards in either form. Even Snell's in Cham didn't have them but they did have a few of the bamboo Interalp clones in the sale bin...I bought three to bring home and made 50cm Zeros out of them.
Bottom axe is a Piolet bamboo clone cut as a Zero. The other two are bamboo as well, one new and the other well used.
The '78 catalog shows painted bamboo Zeros as carbon fiber and the first carbon fiber piolets with Interalp hand forged heads.
Europe got hickory, rexilon and bamboo Chouinard tools and a big dump of hickory and bamboo non Chouinard marked piolets in the end. The Chouinard-Frost logo changed to Chouinard sometime between '76 and before '78. Long before '78 if the cataog typical publish date and when the gear was available was any indication. Catalogs were always months if not years behind current production and availability.
No laminated ash or hickory that I know or seen anyone document beyond speculation. Rexilon is not a synthetic but a simple wood laminate. Grivel also used Rexilon for some of their early technical axes from the same time frame, mid '70s.
Interalp/Camp did make a McKindley axe that was similar to the Chouinard Piolet for REI as early as 1980. Close examination shows there are a lot of differences. They had a positive clearence pick, a slightly curved adze and a ash or rexilon shaft. 1980 catalog shows ash shafted axes. Same big profile Chouinard spike though. They show on ebay once in awhile but they aren't piolets or a close copy of the original.
rexilon
Couple of threads here including the "Ice Primer" thread that offer some good references by those involved at the time. Doug Robinson's comments come to mind.
This is recent picture of an untouched bamboo piolet (dbl teeth, single Chouinard stamped) with the sales stickers still atatched circa 1978. You can see how it is yellowed over time.
Here is a hickory piolet in similar shape without the stickers and the natural darker color and grain of hickory showing well.
And finally hickory handled hammers with bamboo axes. As you can see hickory could come with losts of variation.
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rockermike
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Jun 13, 2010 - 04:09pm PT
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Maybe we can get Yvon to call this contest. Anyone less and I'm not giving an inch. I know I was TOLD mine was laminated Hickory when I bought it - and that's what I'm sticking to. lol
BTW, my recollection of the history matches Bradely's write up to a tee. But my Alzheimers does kick in occasionally. Its not impossible I'm wrong.
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RDB
Social climber
way out there
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Jun 13, 2010 - 08:30pm PT
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Funny stuff. If it helps Rexilon looks a lot like what you would think laminated hickory should look like. Heck if I ever saw a catalog or flyer from Chouinard saying they sold "laminated hickory" or any laminate beyond Rexilon I might believe if was laminated hickory :)
My partner was told his axe pictured in Fritz's photo was Rexilon. He was very proud of his heavy POS and the fact it was a Rexilon axe :)
Fitz's photo was taken in May of 1976 and he bought the axe in the fall/winter of '75.
Here is what we do know of RK's axe:
Very nice axe in excellent condition worth $300+ to $500 in today's collector market
We know it is a dbl tooth axe
We know it is a chouinard-frost axe
We know the handle is not laminated bamboo
We knwo the handle is not straight Hickory
We know the handle is laminated
(more)
It should have the later three rivet head
Early Chouinard-Frost axes had a 2 rivets and a single set of teeth
we don't know what the wood laminate is (but most agree it is Rexilon)
DR (if that is appropriate) or Coonyard can make the definate judgement call on the handle material :)
Come on, someone here knows Chouinard's email..send him the pictures and ask!
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Fritz
Trad climber
Hagerman, ID
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Jun 13, 2010 - 10:44pm PT
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Rockermike:
Re: BTW, my recollection of the history matches Bradely's write up to a tee. But my Alzheimers does kick in occasionally. Its not impossible I'm wrong.
Thank you for leaving the window of doubt on your memories.
Early on in this thread : I posted photos out of a Chouinard 1975-76 catalog with a page that had copy on Rexilon Piolets.
RDB has "first-person stories about his climbing buddy buying and using a Rexilon axe in the mid-1970's. That is backed up with his photos of a Chouinard axe collection that “makes me salivate.” (I only own 60, 70, & 80 Cm. bamboo piolets).
So-----rockermike--------would you post up photos of your hickory piolet for us to critique?
Otherwise: I must go to evaluating your input, based on: those “who really want to believe” criteria.
Did you vote for G.W. Bush both times? Do you own "beachfront" property in Florida,------or do you believe there is a "large ark on the moon?"
If so-------I can no longer discuss this topic with you.
Well-----maybe, if I had a tough day, and drink some wine.
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Tobia
Social climber
GA
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Jun 13, 2010 - 11:02pm PT
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The axe i posted had no markings i could find... The Mastadon would know, it belonged to him.
I have a copy of that Chouinard Catalog with the mountains on the back cover.
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RDB
Social climber
way out there
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Jun 14, 2010 - 01:41am PT
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Fitz, fwiw I have given away or sold most of my Chouinard axe collection in the last year. Felt like I was getting a little greedy :) One went to BD as they didn't have one in the hardware collection and it seem required to me.
I have kept my original bamboo and a second, early, 2 rivet duplicate that is in like new, and unused condition. I just never liked the thicker bladed dbl tooth tools. Then or now. Totally different feel and look for me from the earliest Piolets. That and the fact that most everyone I have seen has a slightly bent pick from the hand forging. Looking at the pick straight on almost all bend slightly to the right. The thicker bladed dbl tooth picks even more so.
new
old
Fun that so many of us used these tools as our first technical tool. I climbed my first water ice with one. And truely loved climbing water ice with a Zero axe later on. I used a Zero and a Chacal for many pure water ice routes till the spring of '82. Thing I find the most amazing is the Piolet was only available for a very short amount of time, between late 1969 and fall of 1978.
I cracked the shaft on my origial piolet on a Canadian waterfall back in winter of '76/'77 and then relagated it to guiding for years until I just couldn't justify it any more by late '80s.
Crack is the small black line bottom right of the tang.
By then generally only older guides would know what it was. And clients were questioning my choice of equipment, "climbing with a "wooden" axe" ;-) Rewelded the tip several times early on and did a terrible job last year bringing it back to "new". Just haven't gotten around to redoing it yet. Way more work than I remember.
Piolet on a late fall ascent of Ptarmigan ridge in '75.
In better days, summit of Liberty Cap on a guided traverse N/S in '78.
Rainier in obviously '80s fashion style! And one of the last guided trips I used my original piolet on. I had taped the shaft top to bottom to protect the bamboo by the point. I realised doing so negated much of the reason I wanted to use it
A toast to all the good days out we spent with our piolets!
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RDB
Social climber
way out there
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Jun 14, 2010 - 02:11am PT
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Re: the Bradley web info?
It first pays to realise this info is used to promote a piece of jewelery.
Hard to take it seriously in that context as "history".
The Alpinist's Piolet Cuff $210.00
http://www.bradleyalpinist.com/cart/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2&products_id=465&zenid=m7t4j7uovhe0r5hd4rel5daf87
I think much of the important info on the Chouinard Piolet from the Bradley web site is pure fiction. Let me detail why. I would be pleased if anyone can dispute my comments and would offer first hand evidence of their own details. I am only looking to document the truth, nothing more.
My comments are highlighted.
from: http://www.bradleyalpinist.com/cart/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=28
RE: Chouinard-Frost Piolet
"Somewhere long about 1969, Yvon Chouinard and Tom Frost, of Chouinard Equipment in Ventura, California, commissioned the Codega brothers to build an axe to their specifications. This axe, called the Chouinard-Frost Piolet, featured a hand forged, ground and polished chrome-nickle steel head and a hickory shaft, and has since been a mountaineering equipment classic in the both the US and in the Alps. By printing time of Chouinard Equipment's first catalog in 1972, the Chouinard Piolet shown on page 34 had a new laminated bamboo shaft design, dubbed to be lighter weight and just as strong as the hickory shafted orginal.
Over the next 7 years, the Chouinard Piolet went through a few other design changes, including a revised marking on the head, omitting "Frost" from "Chouinard-Frost". This change was first seen in the 1978 catalog, even though Tom Frost had left the company years earlier, in 1975."
Chouinard catalogs were long known to retailers for being late to the retail market with many items discontinued or unavailable by the time the catalog made it to print and to the dealers. By 1978 the wooden handle Chouinard axes of any type were no longer available in Europe or by then easily available in the USA. And by the fall of '78 even Snell's in Chamonix had the Camp bamboo Chouinard clones on sale, what few they did have. Mind you these were "newest" three rivet dbl tooth heads but with no Chouinard marking. In 1978 The last of the US imported axes had a 3 rivet head and only Chouinard stamped on them.
The 1978 Great Pacific Iron Works catalog (formerly Chouinard and their 3rd catalog) is a interesting mix of the newest carbon fiber Piolet with a hand forged head and "fake" carbon fiber Zeros with bamboo shafts painted to resemble carbon fiber. Clearly a transition time for Chouinard piolets. The Carbon fiber axes were available by the winter of '79. I bought both a carbon fiber piolet and a Zero axe that winter. Found the early carbon fiber lacking on hard Canadian ice and went back to a bamboo Zero axe, now, in '79, extremely hard to find.
"Other designs of the Piolet included a version with two sections of teeth or notches(double-toothed) on the drooped and curved pick. In other modifications, the shaft material changed again, first to a laminated hickory, then laminated ash for a short time, and eventually a synthetic called Rexilon in 1979, after the UIAA began to raise concerns with the integrity of "wooden" axe shafts. All wooden shafted variations of the Chouinard's Piolet were made by C.A.M.P., but the axe model was phased out of production after 1979."
I have never seen laminated hickory or laminated ash Chouinard Piolets in Europe or the NA market. Even more importantly I have no record of either in any Chouinard or GPIW printed material. (3 catalogs and one major update flyer) I was told by sales people at Snell's in the fall of '78 that CAMP would no longer produce either the Chouinard piolets in any wooden form or the CAMP clones. The reasoning behind that was the new UIAA guidelines for shaft strength. Imagine my surprise with two of us showing up for the late alpine ice season thinking we'd buy new tools at Snell's! Plan "B" wasn't all that attactive.
My partner bought a Rexilon marked shaft Piolet in either Spokane or Seattle the 1st half of the winter of '75/'76. And I have owned a number of both hickory and bamboo piolets.
Codegas offered virtually the same ice axe (same head, with bamboo or hickory shafts)in Europe, sans the Chouinard marking (although markings still included "Interalp", "CAMP" and "Made in Premana" which are all also found on the "Chouinard-Frost: and "Chouinard" stamped versions).
True, but as mentioned above it ended fall of '78
"In the early 80's, the REI Coop contracted with with C.A.M.P., having this same axe design orginated by Chouinard, stamped with the REI logo. These axes were offered in REI's original Seattle store through the mid 1980's."
Again, close but not accurate. The CAMP McKinley was offered in the '80 catalog and maybe even earlier but while a CAMP axe it was not a clone of the original Chouinard Piolet design.
I worked at several retail climbing shops from '73 to '85, which is where some of my comments come from.
Slightly off topic but worth repeating after finding the info again.
Someone mentioned the first Chacal? (widely acknowledged as the first reverse curved blade)
THE very first Chacel was Gordon Smith's and the design didn't become commercially available until '79. Simond gave samples to all the climbers attending the International Resemblance in Chamonix in '79.
From the "Ice Primer" thread:
"In 1978 I got hold of THE prototype Chacal from Luger Simond - He was going to make a straight drooped pick but I held the shaft of the axe while he cut holes in an ordinary curved pick blank reversed. Then he cut teeth and changed the angle of the end of the pick to make a point to penetrate the ice and lo, the first reversed banana pick. Worked brilliantly!!
Gordon Smith"
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Jun 14, 2010 - 02:20am PT
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I have the Northwall hammer version of that piolet. I'll take a photo in the morning (think it's [big]bambu')
Used to have an
MSR T-bird as well (my first axe)until thieves stole it...
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Jun 14, 2010 - 10:40am PT
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My memory can make swiss cheese look comparatively like solid granite, but as I recall:
Rexilon = laminated hickory.
And I gotta say it: What is that piece-of-sh*t MSR axe doing in this thread? Any time they bumped into anything they would vibrate like a tuning fork. And some were bright orange? -- give me a break!
Plus they look and feel sort of like an industrial accident compared to the graceful lines of the Piolet.
I don't know if Penberthy was an aerospace guy -- it's tempting to think of all Seattle engineers as ex-Boeing -- but his error in thinking that led to "positive hooking angle" reminds me of the classic mistake aeronautical engineers made regarding the sound barrier. See, if they calculated flying a steady speed right at the speed of sound, the aircraft would develop harmonic vibrations and tear itself apart. Only when they re-imagined the problem as flying through the sound barrier could that difficulty evaporate.
The Piolet's wooden shafts -- any of the batch -- gave important dampening to vibration. YC couldn't begin to consider a bare aluminum tube for a shaft, and even though concerned about strength he didn't go away from wood until the blue carbon shafts, which were a lot more vibration-damp, and almost approached wood in that regard.
Somewhere -- probably Climbing Ice -- YC and I made short work of debunking the theory of hooking angle. See, if the snow-ice surface is so bulletproof that it could matter, it's way too dense to arrest on anyway. When you're arresting, the tip of the pick is buried in the snow, so its angle becomes irrelevant...
The chisel tip on the Piolet is anyway designed for the far more important positive task of penetration and holding on water ice, not for the catch-up work of arresting a fall.
End of rant.
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RDB
Social climber
way out there
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Jun 14, 2010 - 12:00pm PT
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And a good rant it is..you ought to write more often DR :)
But...and I don't know sh#t beyond what I find on the net, there are 3 referneces that Rexilon is a Beech wood laminate in 16, 18 and 20 form. I suspect that is the number of wood layers ina specific measurement, .10" or one mm maybe.
Flywheel Rotor Safe-Life Technology: Literature Search Summary By J. B. Chang, D. A. Christopher, J. K. H. Ratner
http://www.varioustopics.com/climbing/656481-rexilon.html
Minor trivia of interest to almost nobody:
"The rexilon shaft on Chouinard ice axes was made of a laminate of
18-layers of beech ("faggio" in Italian). It was originally used for
pole-vaulting poles in the days before fiberglass composites. CAMP used
this before bamboo but both were available for a while.
BTW the CAMP/Cassin factory in Premana is very cool. Not many companies
do their own heat treating (usually sub-contracted) as well as most
other steps of production. A true family business in a beautiful
location."
I also can't find a reference any where in the pole vaulting histories to actual use of Rexilon wood laminated vaulting pole past the uncredited "climbing" comment. Although Bamboo is mentioned often and I would assume that was a laminate.
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Jun 14, 2010 - 12:09pm PT
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Thanks, Dane.
And, I so appreciate your joy in ferreting out the accurate history of the tools and techniques for carving up so brittle and exacting a medium. Not to mention your vast and cutting-edge career of carrying that onward and upward.
Joyful (even to sleeping with your tools?) but never lapsing into OCD.
All while carrying an Ultima Thule, no less.
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Jun 14, 2010 - 12:26pm PT
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Yeah, that axe was really a fitting tool for Northwest bumbly snow sloggers. No offense -- in the least -- to those of you from the NW who actually climbed.
Larry's stove irked me too.
It was a good design, though: solid footing, fairly light, burned common fuels and was/is a white hot boiler. Clever roll-up windscreen, too.
But cranking one up in the gentle quiet of a mountain morning shattered the calm with all the subtlety of a jet engine.
I've always burned propane.
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RDB
Social climber
way out there
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Jun 14, 2010 - 12:28pm PT
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Hey, you promised not to mention anything in public about "sleeping with my tools".
But Doug, seriously.
Rexilon = laminated hickory? Or was there Rexilon and a laminated hickory production? How about the laminated ash?
Anyone we could actually ask the would know the background?
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Jun 14, 2010 - 12:29pm PT
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The MSR Thunderbird was sturdy and reliable, unlike anything else on the market in the early 1970s that was affordable. (If I remember rightly, the T-Bird cost about half what the Chouinard-Frost axe did.) It was one of the first axes the shaft of which didn't often break. The T-Bird was made for real mountains, where it was as likely to be used for chopping wood, bush, or a tent platform as it was for chopping snow or ice. It was also properly designed for self-arrest, one of the first axes with that attribute.
Yes, they were endearingly ugly, and yes, Larry Penberthy had some
interesting ideas - one of which was that reliable climbing equipment was as much an engineering as a design problem. But they were very functional.
As for MSR stoves. Well, they had interesting innovations, e.g. pressurized fuel reservoir that was separate from the burner, windscreen. But the burner itself wasn't anything new.
Must post a photo of my own Chouinard-Frost axe.
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Jun 14, 2010 - 12:33pm PT
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Yes, they were endearingly ugly
I love your wit, Anders.
And yeah, the esthetics of YC's tools even then strained a dirtbag budget. Though a couple of years of swinging one of Penberthy's clanking, dayglo monsters -- even for chopping roots out of a tent platform -- was enough to encourage stepping up to the expense of a real tool, finely crafted.
Worked for you, right?
Edit: Oops, sorry Dane.
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RDB
Social climber
way out there
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Jun 14, 2010 - 12:46pm PT
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Hey I just left a call for YC but he is out till Nov. But did get someone there looking for a reliable and quotable source on shaft materials that actually did make production on the piolet. Likely they will be calling DR!
Also left a message @ Tom Frost's new business phone asking the same.
I'd like to see the questions on shaft materials used put to rest once and for all.
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Jun 14, 2010 - 12:47pm PT
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I think the name Rexilon is itself the red herring here. It sounds so techno-resin. It also sounds more Euro than named here. And I recall other brands of Euro axes (Grivel maybe, I'm thinking? A delicately-forged head, very light.) that had Rexilon shafts before Chouinard's Piolet did.
The layers of hickory are remarkably thin in those shafts. Which means that the glue used to laminate them became a significant portion of the overall shaft. I'm thinking the laminating glue was actually a resin of some kind, just from the handling qualities of the resulting axe, which were quite good.
BTW, in that narrow-side view of the shaft, we're looking at a rounded cut of a single lamination, hence the grain.
As for laminated ash: I'm stumped on that one.
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Fritz
Trad climber
Choss Creek, ID
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Jan 29, 2013 - 11:59am PT
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I'm currently selling an extra (excess?) Chouinard Piolet on E-Bay. The axe is only marked Chouinard and has the numeral 2 stamped on the shaft.
I have memories that the very last bamboo shafts did have numbers stamped on them, but it is argued that the 2 means the product was a second.
Anyone have memories, or better yet a photo of a wood shaft Piolet with a different numberal on it?
In search of an answer, I contacted the original Chouinard rep for the Northwest. He worked the territory from around 1973 to the early 1980's and does not wish to have his name quoted on the internet.
He writes:
Hello Ray,
The ice axes came from Inter Alp in large wooden shipping boxes.
The axes were individually packaged in a zip lock bag.
The boxes were lined with a waxed shipping paper to prevent moisture from entering them
The lids were removed and the inventory was stored in those boxes for shipment.
There was no inspection of the axes in the US.
They were shipped to the retailer or mail order customer as is.
There were two models in two sizes, Rexalon and Bamboo, 60 and 70 cm.
The ice axe in the image is the second generation with the additional set of teeth near the handle for frozen waterfalls climbing.
There were no seconds produced or sold ( intentionally).
I do not know about the stamp mark.
D.
I do appreciate memories from 1978 are suspect, so I would love a photo of your axe with a numeral on the shaft.
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