New Arborist Harness Accessories

Video Caption File/Transcript by Arborist Industry Expert Nick Bonner

[Music] Hi, I'm Nick Bonner for TreeStuff.com, and today we're going to talk about new popular harness accessories. We have another video, which you can see, that shows all of our most popular harness accessories, and in that, we cover things like the Shem, the Caritool, the Transporter, and the Vault, which we have here for reference today. But mostly, I want to focus on some of the new options.

I don't have the CAMP Kilo here with me today, which is a newer, affordable entry into the marketplace. It's very simple. We're going to give it some air time here—Kale's going to bring it up on the screen and show you—but the CAMP Kilo is a great option if you're looking for one of the metal tool holders versus one of the plastic options.

But with that out of the way, let's look. First, this is a Singing Rock Porter, and I think we showed this in our other video as well, but this represents kind of like your entry point or baseline for plastic tool holders. This is very similar to the standard old style of the Petzl Caritool, but it lacks that little plastic fang, I guess you would call it, here that helps orient it, so you do need to use a rubber configuration aid when you set this up.

Petzl has revamped and updated their line of Caritools with the Caritool Evo, and this is a better plastic. It feels more like a glass fiber kind of style thing. I'm not sure if it is glass fiber, to be totally honest with you, but it definitely has a higher quality, and I think you can see right away as I start to flex it that it's a better plastic or compound than you find on some of the other ones, so I definitely see that as an improvement.

Also, you're going to get some upgrades to the racking horn here. The spring is not super tight, which I like, and you see this back side here is where the real update has happened. What you do is you pull this off and remove this here. So, because there's this channel here, when this is flipped this way, it's locked, and when you flip it this way, it unlocks and allows you to pull it off like this. This metal rod, when you go to fit this to a harness, is going to make it really easy compared to some of the other options when you want to thread this through and get it on there, and then because of the way that it locks, it's going to be really easy to get on and off of the harness, so I like that.

It's not as secure as, say, some of the flatter clamping styles that you see from Rock Exotica, which has this really wide clamping surface. This does move around a little bit more. Still, in the metal zone, you know, you kind of have—these are the two most popular ones on the market today. This is your tried and true Rock Exotica Transporter. We cover this in the other video, so we won't spend too much time on it, but open, shut, locked, which is pretty nice. And then the DMM Vault, which—open, shut, and locked, which is pretty nice.

Where the Vault really excels, I think, is in the elegance of its mechanism. I just want to show this here. So, you will loosen this flathead screw—sorry about that, okay, I'll have some fun with that in post-production, sorry about that—it still doesn't open, but once you open the gate, this is going to open, and then when you go to put this on the harness, you're just going to slide that under, close this, and then reinsert the flathead screw. So, you know, compared to the Rock Exotica one, which is four screws, this is a little bit more elegant of a solution. Again, I think the Rock Exotica one probably has the most clamping force out of all of them.

So, there we go. We covered our plastic and our metal tool holders, and I think one of the main reasons we wanted to do this video was to talk about these new options that are all from DMM, and we're going to cover three kind of distinct products here.

So, these are the Micro Vaults. These are little miniature versions—it's kind of like a cross between the DMM XSRE and the DMM Vault—and you have a screw lock carabiner kind of action here with a gate. These are rated to three kilonewtons; the MBS on these—they do have a little micro racking horn like you would find on a normal tool carrier and are totally keylock with a screwed-on lock, so that in itself is pretty cool.

When we start to look here and we see that it actually has these two mounting screws—these are two and a half millimeter—and you can just loosen these and attach them directly to the appropriate size holes, which these happen to match up with the spacing on the Tree Motion, so you can direct mount one of these right to the back of your Tree Motion harness, which is pretty neat. Or, we'll cover the parking lot here in just a second, but before we get there, I want to point out that this mechanism actually allows this to pivot, which is pretty cool, right? Nice. Neil is nodding—he thinks that's pretty sweet too.

But they take it a step further—DMM and the Treemagineers team, not to be outdone—you take your two and a half millimeter Allen key here and pop this bad boy out.

If you notice here, there's a little flange that you don't see on this side, so the forging is actually asymmetrical. When we tighten this—I think our keen-eyed observers probably already know what it's going to do—but now this is locked in place perpendicular. So, when you anchor this either to your Parking Lot or to your Tree Motion saddle, it's not going to be able to pivot, and you see that's distinctly different from this one. I think that's just a really neat, well-thought-out feature and a way to add value to the product.

Next, we're going to talk about these new gear loops here. These are awesome. One of the things that surprised me when I looked at this—I thought it was like a hard plastic, I expected it to have a snap to it, but it doesn't. It's actually, I think, like a natural rubber kind of material. It's a little firmer than natural rubber, but it's really cool, it's very soft. This is, again, going to anchor directly into the holes on your Tree Motion harness or, like we've been kind of alluding to, to your Parking Lot.

So, the Parking Lot is small, it's plastic, it's not metal—sorry about that, you can hear that—but it is, again, it feels like that glass fiber, that really tough, dense plastic. You'll simply remove these two bolts here, and this back piece is going to come off, and that's going to allow you to insert this on a harness like this, like this, like this, and clamp it down. From here, these different accessories are going to mount onto it, and you can use this on pretty much any harness that takes a Caritool or a tool carrier. So, I think it was nice that DMM expanded this so that these tools could be used on harnesses other than, say, the Tree Motion.

So, there we have it. We covered some of the newest harness accessories. If you just got a harness and you're looking for ways to accessorize it, definitely check out these options. Also, watch our other video where we cover some of the longer, kind of longer-in-market items, some of the original Caritools. We covered these more in depth, we talk about the Shem [__] and things like that. So, thanks for watching, and thanks for shopping with TreeStuff.com.