The original entry here was a rather rusty old blade piton listed as a ‘Rock Piton’ without any provenance. We’ve now replaced our rusty old blade with these fine Stubai blades, almost rust free. We calling them ‘blades’ as they certainly look that way, though they are listed as ‘Horizontals’ in the 1960s George Fisher catalogue above. Ours are item 7 in the Stubai column and the price of 2/3d (two shillings & three pennies) equates to approximately 12p today.

Whatever you wish to call them, these guys date from the 1950s, or maybe a little earlier, a time when pitons were the main form of protection on rock climbs, and everyone carried a bunch of them along with a piton hammer.

One of the three has the Ellis Brigham stamp, indicating that it was retailed through one of his shops back in the 1960s, having been bought wholesale from Stubai in Austria. We found these three in our box of ‘spares’ affectionately known as the ‘piton graveyard’.