I have been experimenting with the Ropeman ascender for about one year. I have used it as a lanyard camming device on 1/2" rope. Last year I spoke to someone at Wild Country about using 1/2" rope in this ascender; his response was, "if it fits... use it". For the reason that not all 1/2" diameter arborist ropes are truly 1/2", my success with this combination of rope size and the ascender has varied with the brand of rope used. I have found that the cam on the Ropeman will occasionally fail to engage when used with the larger ropes; with the smaller ropes it works quite nicely. As you mentioned another variable in making this work is the diameter of the metal used for attaching the ascender. One thing to consider is that the smaller this surface gets the closer to being a knife edge it becomes when the rope is pinched between it and the cam. ONE time I experimented with using a small steel rapid-link instead of a carabiner, I say ONE time because the metal was much too thin to
be an effective cam inte
rface.
I have to point out that when I was experimenting with these configurations it was not done at 80' but on the ground.
I also think the Ropeman is a useful tool especially because of its small (and therefore highly packable) size. Just to mention... I have also used it as a conventional ascender and in impromptu rigging systems.
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