Meaty review: I received four of the new DMM phantom krabs yesterday, so I thought I’d give them a quick write up. First impressions: Wow! This is light. The phantom is currently the lightest krab in the world and a meagre 25g per biner. I’m very impressed by its weight, strength (23kn closed, 7kn cross loaded and 9kn gate open) and size - I can’t see krabs getting much smaller than this while still being usable. Size wise the karabiner is virtually identical to a Black Diamond Neutrino, but with a deeper nose, making it more appropriate for racking wires. I was a little dubious about its size at first, thinking that its small capacity would make it harder to clip in extremis, but having used BD neutrinos quite a lot and played around with the Phantom I’m convinced that this is the way forward. DMM are manufacturing the krab in 7 funky colours: red, yellow, blue, green, purple, silver and grey. In my view the only downside to the Phantom is that is too small for racking wires . I'm sure just as with the first wiregates, the hotwire it will be recived sceptically, but to my mind light is right so the Phantom is the way forward.
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Quick summary: An excellent little krab that has set the standard as the new light, leaving those old hotwires looking very heavy indeed. This is the perfect biner for anyone who is serious about shaving the weight off his or her rack.
When I’ve abused mine I will add more. The Phantom currently looks like what I will be replacing my old quickdraws with.
Competition: Black Diamond Oz (28g), Camp Nano Wire (28g).
More info at:http://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/page.php?id=375http://www.dmmclimbing.com/productsDetails.asp?id=&id2=50The DMM Phantom will soon be available in all good climbing shops in a range of colours for: £7.50 each.
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