We’ve got two ‘Racks’ here in the collection, we know for sure that one is a Petzl, hence the Petzl logo in the picture above, and we think the other is an earlier version though there are no markings to confirm this. Fernand Petzl was a French caver who started making gear for caving back in 1968, though he didn’t create the Petzl company until 1975, which leaves us with a calculated guess that the Petzl logo appeared post 1975.

Racks could be used as an abseil device, but were more commonly used for lowering things like mountain rescue stretchers or heavy caving gear, the bars can be flipped in or out to create more, or less, friction.

These devices, along with many similar ones, were the subject of much controversy as wet, muddy and icy ropes gave different levels of friction which wasn’t easy to judge until things went wrong, a back-up device was required making things complicated and we’re not sure about the cavers, but we do know that mountain rescuers pretty much gave up and brought their use to a ‘Stop’.