Vertical caving terminology and methods > Personal SRT gear
A rack that has had the rope fed through it in the wrong direction for the bars (behind the ones it is supposed to be in front of, and vice versa). Instead of the pressure from the rope keeping the bars closed, it forces them open, releasing the rack, and dropping the caver down the pitch. Some designs of rack, such as the Petzl rack, use fixed and floppy bars, instead of clipped bars, which immediately pop open before being loaded, to notify the caver that the rack has not been rigged correctly before they attempt to place a load on it. Other designs use a very obvious groove in the bars to show which side to load them, and some designs use half-round bars to make it obvious. Users of racks that do not have any of these safety features need to be especially careful, since most rack designs allow the rack itself to be placed facing forwards or backwards, or even (intentionally) sideways, so the user cannot rely on the first bar always being loaded from the same side. The most easy way to tell is that the rope should never be on the side of a bar that has the open side of the bar's clip.
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