Woody's sent us a hold from their line up called the "Garage Cluster", and we stuck it on the wall a while back, grabbed our chalk bags and had a pull.. to see what was up. At first glance the hold grabs your attention, it's pretty big with five of pockets clustered about the shape, upon climbing its obvious that it can be approached pretty much from any direction and that there are a multitude of ways to grab it, and then you grab it and then quite quickly (in some cases) you let go again, look at your fingers and wonder what happened!
So you try again, you move into the hold, grab the same pocket and let go again. If you're anything like us you're pretty quick to grab a wrench and to get it off of the wall so you can closer inspect whats going on... and here's what we found:
A texture that's not only some of the roughest we've come across in a long while but areas of imperfection in that texture that is just plain painful... very painful. Now add this into the fact that the pocket lips are pretty sharp and not rounded and you start wondering whether it should be bolted back onto the wall...
We're troopers over here... so back it went:
Overall it's a good hold to grab onto, anyone from a 5.5 climber or above are going to have little or no trouble pulling down on this monster. Moving dynamically into this hold does require some attention to where you're going to hit but that's just a case of practice more than anything else.
I went on over to Woody's holds and checked out their entire line, and there's a fair few holds that I've not seen before, they also have a kit that allows you to design your own hold! For $50 you will get a 3" x 2" x 7" foam blank and some sandpaper with which you can shape your hold. Once done you send off the blank and 2-4 weeks later your hold will arrive, it will be added to their catalouge of holds and you'll earn store credits for everyone sold to spend at Woody's. Now that's a pretty neat idea... we'll give it a try some time soon!
Anyway's back to the hold (I got side tracked) all that's really left to do is to rate the hold, our rating system has changed so we'll use our new "Pro's and Con's" system... with our usual comments!!
RATING
NOODLES SAYS
For $24.99 you're getting a pretty big and versatile hold, unfortunately you're also getting is a bunch of imperfections that go along with it, now i'm not really into getting holds and then having to get my Dremel out and sanding down the imperfections, I don't expect to have to do this so it's a pretty big negative for me. I also found, like we said above, that the edges on the pockets are sharp and could cause someone that's not aware of tendon injuries some harm, I've nailed alot of my finger tendons at one time or another so I was pretty careful when I climbed on this hold.
I've seen some stuff on the web from people that are super happy with the design a hold stuff that Woody's does, they looked well finished and smooth. I'd be interested to see how our hold turns out!
CHRIS SAYS
Like Noodles said you want to be careful when committing to this hold. Its big enough to do chin ups on but I wouldn't recommend doing dynos with it. On the positive, when this hold is on the wall you just want to grab onto it. So that got me interested in what other designs Woody's has to offer. I took a peek at their website and was impressed with what they have to offer. They take the time to design most of their holds around real rock. Hey Woody's: Ever think about making mold's of the real thing? All things considered, other the loss of some skin, I think this hold is a good addition for any wall.
PRO
- Easy to hold, and lots of options to hold
- Quite light
- Unique design
- You must used a deck screw to stop the hold from spinning
- The general texture is pretty full on
- There are bobbles for texture flaws in areas that you're going to grab, that do need to be sanded down...
- Pocket edges are quite sharp and could cause an injury if you're not careful
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