Did We Really Do That?

This is quite a long story so I've broken it down in to a few parts. I cannot emphasise enough that doing what we did is a REALLY bad idea, no one should consider doing anything like this!

Tim and I used to be in the Air Cadet Corps and as part of that we got to take part in all sorts of fun activities like flying, shooting and abseiling. We were particularly fond of the abseiling.

Shortly after I passed my driving test Tim and I decided to go on holiday together in Kent. My family had a mobile home in Hythe and we arranged to go there for a weekend.

Close to the site where the mobile home was kept there was a very large 'hill', I'm not sure how high it was but it was huge. I was telling Tim all about how there had been a recent landslide and that parts of the hill had collapsed exposing rock faces beneath. Between us we came up with the idea that we could climb up the hill and abseil down the cliff faces.

There was one minor problem with this idea however: Neither of us owned and abseiling or climbing gear, nor did we have the money to buy any!

As we were both design and technology students at school we came up with a solution which was to make our own abseiling gear. For the next week of technology 'lessons' we set about making a figure 8 and a karabiner. Both of these were made by bending an aluminium bar into the appropriate shape. The figure 8 was a bit too weak to take our weight so we reinforced it with a brass plate and some screws! The karabiner was made in much the same way but we used a large bolt in order to open and close it.

Quite proud of our creations we then had to find ourselves some suitable rope and a harness. At first Tim found an old seat belt that he proposed that we use for the harness but this idea was rejected as we thought it was too much work to modify it. I then came up with the idea of using a leather trouser belt because I thought it would be really strong and that it could be easily adjusted.

Tim rummaged through his dads garage at home and managed to find several lengths of blue nylon rope. None of the lengths was particularly long but we thought that they would be enough. Although the rope was quite thin we both judged it to be adequate to take our weight, after all, we were becoming experts. Or so we thought.

We were both very proud of our DIY abseiling gear!

I'm not sure what happened to our abseiling gear. I'd love to take a photo of it to demonstrate just how dangerous it was, we were both totally mad to even contemplate using it, but we did!

What happened when we tried to use it is another story...

Matt

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