YY Vertical’s VerticalBase and SandwichBase: A No-Drill Hangboard Setup
- Sponsored by YY Vertical
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
YY Vertical, based in the French Alps, set out to solve a basic but very real problem: how do you install a hangboard at home without breaking out a drill or turning your wall into Swiss cheese? The brand’s answer is two no-drill mounting systems, the VerticalBase and the SandwichBase. We set up both at home and at the office, on one weirdly sized door and one pretty questionable partition wall, to see whether the promise actually held up.
There’s a sentence you hear from just about every climber at some point: “I really need to put a hangboard up at home.” The response usually comes right behind it: “Yeah, but I can’t drill into the wall. Or the door frame. Or this cardboard drywall.”
A hangboard, that finger-strength training board climbers use for dead hangs and pull-ups, is both a sign that someone is finally getting serious about training and the start of a long negotiation with the place they live in: permanent holes, shaky DIY, plaster that looks one session away from giving out, endless discussions with the landlord or whoever also has to live with the setup in the middle of the apartment.
That is exactly where YY Vertical comes in with two no-drill hangboard mounts: the VerticalBase and the SandwichBase. The promise is simple: real training, several times a week, without leaving a mark on the door or the wall.
A hangboard without drilling into the wall
Most climbers have seen it somewhere: a hangboard screwed in above a doorway, bolted straight into a wall that never asked for any of this. YY Vertical flips the problem around. Instead of relying on the wall, both systems use the door and the door frame.
The VerticalBase and SandwichBase work off the same basic idea: the hangboard stays in place through compression and support, not drilling. This is not improvised DIY. It is a system designed to spread the load and avoid the kind of damage people worry about with a fixed setup.
For this test, we deliberately picked two situations where most people would think twice before installing a traditional hangboard:
At home, a wide interior door with molding, about as far from standard as it gets.
At the office, a lightweight partition wall that sounded hollow the second you knocked on it.
Both are the kind of setups that make you think: if this goes wrong, it is not just the hangboard coming down. The wall might come with it.
VerticalBase: making a tough doorway usable
The VerticalBase went up first, at home. The door frame is deep and topped with molding, exactly the kind of place where most people give up on the idea of a hangboard before they even start. Nothing about it matches standard dimensions, and the idea of drilling into it dies before the drill even leaves the drawer.
It is the kind of setup that pushes the whole “hangboard at home” plan into the familiar pile of delays: later, when we have a more normal door, later, in the next apartment.
Setting up the VerticalBase, though, was surprisingly straightforward. Attach the hangboard, adjust the telescoping frame, brace it against the edge of the doorway, tighten it down. No tools to hunt for. No careful measuring. No bubble level dragged out for a one-time home-improvement moment. In about 30 seconds, the hangboard was up and at a height that actually made sense for training.
The unit has two usable sides: the front for the hangboard, and the back, where you can mount holds. That turns the doorway into a small adjustable training wall without adding anything to the wall itself. The built-in bubble level lets you check that everything is straight at a glance. And because the VerticalBase can be set at pretty much any height in the doorway, it is easy to switch things up: full pull-ups, lower dead hangs, technical work around shoulder height, or simple adjustments based on the user’s height.
We left it in place for three weeks and did not go easy on it. Session after session, different people hung on it, cycling through dead hangs, pull-ups, and a few more dynamic moves to see whether anything would start to shift. When it finally came down, the result was simple and concrete: no marks inside the doorway. No compression damage. No scratches. Not even the kind of tiny chip you would be tempted to pretend you never noticed.
SandwichBase at the office: the partition wall that somehow survived
The SandwichBase got sent into slightly rougher territory: the office. More specifically, the office partition wall. The kind of surface that makes you uneasy just from the sound it makes when you tap on it. It is not the kind of wall anyone would choose for an old-school pull-up bar or a permanently mounted hangboard. Just thinking about screwing anything heavier than a picture frame into it already makes you picture drywall breaking loose.
That is exactly where we installed the SandwichBase.
Its setup is different from the VerticalBase. The support “sandwiches” the doorway by bearing against the frame. In plain English, it does not pull on the partition wall. The load goes through the door structure instead. That still means you need solid trim or molding. When we set it up, we were still skeptical, especially since our trim looked thinner than the recommended 6 mm. In use, that skepticism faded pretty fast.
The hangboard stayed completely stable, even once we started putting real load on it: pull-ups, dead hangs, and a few more energetic movements. The wall did not crack. The frame did not deform. Nothing shifted.
The SandwichBase also has one big advantage in an office or any multi-use room: it comes off in seconds. If you need to close the door, or you have someone coming into a workspace that is not supposed to look like a training area, you remove the mount and the hangboard together, and the room goes right back to normal. Again, no damage to the frame or the wall.
A hangboard at a height you can actually use
There is one point no product page really puts front and center, but this test made it impossible to ignore: height. Before YY Vertical, there was already another hangboard installed in a more traditional spot, above a bathroom door. On paper, that made sense. In real life, it almost never got used. The reason was painfully simple: you needed a step stool to reach it.
The routine was always the same. You would feel like doing a couple of hangs, realize the board was eight inches too high, ask, “Where’s the step stool?”, then get distracted and move on. A training session that starts with a side quest usually does not happen.
With the VerticalBase and SandwichBase, the hangboard ends up at a livable height: high enough to hang without your feet dragging on the floor, low enough to grab with nothing but your hands. You walk by, hop on, do a few reps, and move on with your day.
That is probably where these no-drill mounts really separate themselves from a fixed setup mounted too high. They turn the hangboard into an everyday training tool, not something installed above a doorway that nobody actually uses.
VerticalBase or SandwichBase?
After a few weeks, the use cases became pretty clear.
The VerticalBase stands out as the more versatile option for tricky interiors: wide doors, molding, unusual frames. Its adjustable system lets it work where more traditional setups give up fast. It is easy to picture in an apartment where you want a real training setup without messing up the trim or the look of the place.
The SandwichBase feels more plug-and-play. It is built for a standard door, an office, or a bedroom where you want to install and remove the hangboard in no time. It is also the option that will reassure climbers who have no interest in finding out the hard way what their partition wall can handle. Here, the load goes through the doorway, not the wall. But it does require one simple, non-negotiable thing: a door frame with solid, structural trim or molding. If that molding is purely decorative, it will not be enough.
In both cases, the core promise stays the same: a hangboard installed with no drilling, stable even under dynamic pull-ups, and a much calmer answer to the question, “Am I messing up this wall right now?”
For climbers who want to get stronger without risking damage to their walls, the VerticalBase and SandwichBase check the main boxes: stability, no holes, intact walls, and hang sessions that finally happen on a regular basis.
The VerticalBase is priced at €289 and available here.
The SandwichBase is priced at €189 and available here.
Sponsored by YY Vertical.
