Components
An ice axe consists of at least five components:
- Head — usually made of steel and featuring a pick and adze. A hole in the center is provided for attaching a wrist leash or carabiner.
- Pick — the toothed pointed end of the head, typically slightly curved (aiding both in ergonomics and self-arrest).
- Adze — the flat, wide end of the head used for chopping steps in hard snow and ice.
- Shaft — straight or slightly angled, typically wider front-to-back than side-to-side, flat on the sides and smoothly rounded on the ends. Traditional shafts were made of wood, but are now almost exclusively of lightweight metals (such as aluminum or titanium) or composite (including fiberglass, Kevlar or carbon filament).
- Spike, or ferrule — a steel point at the base of the shaft used for balance and safety when the axe is held by its head in walking stick fashion.
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Famous quotes containing the word components:
“Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)