Climbing Equipment
While working on the first ascent of Kat Pinnacle with Chouinard in 1959, the pair designed and fabricated the Realized Ultimate Reality Piton or RURP, a tiny device that allowed them to finish the most difficult aid climb then completed in North America. This led to a lengthy partnership between Frost and Chouinard in climbing equipment companies such as the Great Pacific Iron Works and Chouinard, Ltd. Frost has described his profession as "piton engineer".
In the late 1960s, Frost and Chouinard turned their attention to ice climbing and its specialized equipment. They developed an alpine hammer with a drooping pick. Although Austrian climbers had improvised rigid crampons decades before by welding a bar across the hinge of conventional crampons, such devices were not commercially available until 1967. That year, Chouinard and Frost began marketing adjustable rigid crampons made of chrome-molybdenum steel.
Frost and Chouinard invented the climbing protection device called the Hexentric. They applied for a U. S. patent in 1974 and it was granted on April 6, 1976. These are still manufactured by Black Diamond Equipment, which is a successor to earlier companies owned by Frost and Chouinard.
Since 1997, Frost has owned a business manufacturing rock climbing equipment called FROSTWORKS.
Read more about this topic: Tom Frost
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