A climbing wall is an artificially constructed wall with grips for hands and feet, usually used for indoor climbing, but sometimes located outdoors. The wall may have places to attach belay ropes, but may also be used to practice lead climbing or bouldering. We recently use automatic belays which reduce operational costs to our clients.
We can design the climbing wall concept for the target audience of our customers. This includes combining a rope course with a climbing facility and auto belay safety system to minimize the operational cost of the owner.
Construction
The simplest type of wall is of plywood construction, known colloquially in the climbing community as a 'woody', with a combination of either bolt-on holds or screw on holds. Bolt-on holds are fixed to a wall with iron bolts which are inserted through the hold, which will have specific bolt points, and then fixed into pre-allocated screw-threaded holes in the wall. Screw-on holds are, by contrast, usually much smaller, owing to the nature of their fixing. These holds are connected to the wall by screws which may be fastened anywhere on the wall's surface.
Some other types of walls include slabs of granite, concrete sprayed onto a wire mesh, pre-made fiberglass panels, large trees, manufactured steel and aluminum panels, textured fiberglass walls and inflatables. A newer innovation is the rotating climbing wall: a mechanical, mobile wall which rotates like a treadmill to match you climbing up.
Routes and grading
Holds come in different colours, those of the same colour often being used to denote a route, allowing routes of different difficulty levels to be overlaid on one another. Coloured tape placed under climbing holds is another way that is often used to mark different climbing routes. In attempting a given route, a climber is only allowed to use grips of the designated colour as handholds but is usually allowed to use both handholds and footholds of the designated colour and surface structures and textures of the "rockface" as footholds.