Bolting Bible - How to drill holes in rocks for climbing and highlining bolts

Do you want to watch us drill some holes in some random driveway? Check it out on this episode of How Not to Highline. Hi, I'm Ryan Jinks and welcome to someone's random driveway that they're going to tear up soon so we can drill all we want. And that's something important is to remember when you stick a hole in rock that it doesn't just get busted up and taken away later and replaced. Please consider before putting holes in rocks because they're going to be there forever. In another video we covered where to place the bolts, what patterns to place those bolts, and in another hole video we showed you how to drill the hole straight and how deep it needs to be with a couple wood blocks to demonstrate what's going on inside the hole. But today we're going to focus on how to actually put the hole in the rock. So we have here some drills and I want to start with these. Now a hammer drill and a hammery rotary drill are two different kinds of drills. This is considered a hammer drill which is just a heavy-duty drill that has a cam unit on the inside and it just kind of lifts up and slaps as it goes and it just doesn't have very much power. I bought this when I first tried to drill because it's cheaper than this one and it doesn't do shit. Now of course my hammer feature on here is pretty shitty now because I've used and abused it but this is a rotary hammer drill and it literally has a piston that's just pounding this thing in to the rock while it spins. What I have here is a Makita rotary hammer drill. A lot of people use Bosch drills which are pretty great tools but I already have a lot of Makita products and a rotary hammer is a rotary hammer and this was significantly cheaper than the Bosch one. So you don't have to spend an arm and a leg just an arm in order to buy one of these. Now the next thing I want to discuss is the drill bits. These are not typical drill bits that you stick in a normal chuck the part you spin right here. It has these grooves on the top which is for an SDS compatible drill bit. It has these balls on the side and you have to line it up and then you push it down and it locks in place because when it hammers you don't want it to come out while it's jack hammering the concrete the rock and then you have the tip which is hardened to go through the rock you have the flute which is the spiral part and you have the land which is the part that's above. Now the the spiral the outside part the part I can touch with my hand right here you don't want to be drilling like this in the rock because you're going to get a lot of friction right there on the outside of this drill bit and so you want to keep it as straight as possible mostly so you have a straight bolt secondly so you're not opening the hole really big because a lot of mechanical bolts are have very tight tolerances to make sure the wedge gets sucked up against the sides and opens it up so that's what holds it in place you want to keep it as still as possible and drill into the hole. Now drill bits come in all different shapes and sizes this one is a two point drill bit and this one here is a four point drill bit and it's got four points on the tip and these tend to drill a little bit faster and that's nicer when you're hand drilling. I find that these two point drill bits that are most common are plenty fine for my rotary hammer drill and they can get worn out so you want to be careful to keep fresh ones with you because they'll change size they'll get smaller and some mechanical bolts have that small tolerance that you really have to make sure the diameter is perfect. Now speaking diameter this is a 14 millimeter diameter which is necessary for some of the gluing bolts that we have and for the Fixi Triplex removable bolts which is one of my favorite bolts to use it requires 12 millimeters like exactly 12.3 or something. When I kept experimenting with different 12 millimeter drill bits for a year because they didn't have any more on their website when I bought the bolts and I searched and searched and searched and not all 12 millimeters are the same. I measured all my drill bits and they were all off within a half a millimeter of each other and if it's too big the whole bolt spins if it's too small you can't get the damn thing in there or back out because they aren't supposed to be removable. Half inch is 12.7 millimeters and that's important for other bolts so you really have to know what your bolt is going to be so you can have the right drill bits and the right length. Now keep in mind this SDS drill bit has these grooves but they have SDS plus and you don't want SDS plus because this thing is like one inch in diameter for like jackhammers and bigger things. You're not likely to find a drill bit this small with SDS plus in it but do keep in mind they also have SDS max which is even bigger but uh SDS versus a normal I bought a whole bunch of drill bits for on ebay or something for uh masonry but it was for like a drill like this that had a normal chuck and when I realized this didn't work those were pointless. So really match up your drill bits with your bolts. Now it's important to bring spare batteries. We did a glacier in Iceland where we had the same setup but with an ice drill bit which was really cool really big and the batteries were dead and there was only two and one of them was dead and we're like oh no the whole project can go down. Many many many times the batteries have been dead. We did a volcano line in Hawaii. Speaking of batteries dying, our camera battery just died. Perfect example right? So I've got spare batteries, spare drill bits, doesn't make have it doesn't make a lot of sense to have a spare drill but you're getting the point. Be prepared. Now once I've identified where I want my bolt holes and there's I've taken into consideration there's no humps or crystals then I start it slowly and I only do that much because this is already scarring the rock but it's not a hole and then you stop you reevaluate you line up your hangers and you make sure that it's exactly what you want before you commit and drill a hole into this rock forever. Once I know I want this hole and everything's ready now it's time to keep the drill straight. It's a lot harder than you think and this is why it's important to practice somewhere in urban land your driveway or somebody else's driveway or your backyard or some random piece of crap that you can just drill and get used to drilling before you do it at the top of a cliff where everyone can see it. So you want to keep it straight and it's really hard to do for a lot of people. Now now that I feel like I've got it straight and I'm ready then I apply pressure. It has to have some pressure in order to drill. Once I get to about there I need to pull it out and pull it back in. Now you're not like you're like you know ******* the rock but you don't want to just leave it in there go the whole time because literally you're just pounding dust. The flute on the drill bit is pulling the dust out but not all of it so you want to help it especially the deeper it gets you want to help it. So we're going to now drill it all the way down. Notice I have safety glasses. So driveways are only four inches thick and I just blew through it but rocks are not. So one trick you can do is to put duct tape on the drill bit where you where you know you need your hole depth to be by just lining up your bolt with it. Now that I've drilled my 14 millimeter hole for my monster crux bolt I have to clean it out. Now I still have to notch it out but we'll do that in a minute. I just want to blow out some of the dust for now. This is just a blow straw with a string attached to it. These do not give nearly the same amount of force of air to clean the hole. These suck. That hardly does anything. These things are nice. I got mine used on ebay for pretty cheap and it blows out a lot more dust and this is another thing you want safety glasses for and you don't want to be breathing this stuff in so hold your breath and don't don't breathe it in. You can see how much dust comes out. If you're drilling a lot you definitely don't want to be using a straw. Now we do have to brush and continue to blow but we're not quite done with our hole yet. You don't want dust on your bolt because you don't want dust and glue to be around each other. But anyways I like to put in my peas backwards. We go over that in other videos because then you can pull it in multiple directions because it's just pulling on the spine and it's not going to twist it. But notching it does help give it stability. So there's two options on how to notch your hole. If you put this in here and you've confirmed it's the right depth, you find out where the furthest point is you need and you're going to mark that. You're going to confirm that is what I want. So you don't have it stick that you're notched longer than you want. Now one thing you can do is you can start here and work towards your mark. Try not to scratch the rock up by letting their drill bounce around. The other option is to start at the hole. I do this more often than not. Start here and then start to tilt it and then I have to keep checking my notch until I know it's right. That's actually really flush with my concrete leaving the metal just just a little bit above the concrete. So the rope will be rubbing that smooth metal instead of rough rock. That right there after that's all filled with glue it's going to be a really great bolt and it's deep enough but I'm not going to waste a lot of glue because I over drilled it. Now I know that I have my bolt the way I want it. I'm going to move that. I'm going to clean these holes really really really good. So I want to get this surface area clean so I don't get stuff to fall in them. Clean out. You do not want to put your holes this close next to each other because it's not far enough apart for the strength of the rock but for the demonstration I had them clean these out and then it's important to have a wire brush. This is a 14 millimeter wire brush which is great for this hole. You want to scrub. You want to twist. You cannot just brush and you cannot just blow. You can see how much dust continues to come out while we keep brushing and blowing. How much of this do you do you ask? Well if there's dust in there your glue won't stick so until it stops being dirty. I'll do this five six seven times if I have to. You want to make sure that you're not getting dust falling back in the hole so you're just wasting your time. I'd say that's about close enough. Make sure this gets really clean. Now if this is too deep what I can do is take one of these little pebbles and set it right there on the throat to hold it up right where I want it and when I fill it up with glue I'll make sure that pebble stays there. I can add it later and it'll just hold it in place until the glue cures. So our hole is perfect for our glue in now and we don't have to notch this if we're just using a mechanical bolt because those have climbing hangers and climbing hangers don't need notches. So now we're going to show you how to hand drill. This is a Rock Tech PEC and this is the same drill bits that we were using. Now this I like to use the four tipped drill bits because it'll do it better and faster since I'm hand drilling and I use fresh ones because that also goes faster. You lift it up the same SDS chuck and it won't fall out. What you can do is put this on your wrist so it won't fall off because most of the time you're near a cliff edge and it is important if that is the cliff edge to try to clip off to something even if it's a tree way back there. How do you hand drill you ask? Take your hand and you drill and you hit it with a hammer. This is a Yosemite big wall hammer. I tend to like it because it's got a clip-on point and it's got a hole for a carabiner and it's the perfect size and everything. I'm going to hit the drill bit with the hammer and turn it kind of at the same time not at the same time but as I'm hammering this I got to turn it so it is kind of obnoxious to do and a lot of work actually. It is pretty common to want to turn it like this and you end up making kind of a bigger diameter hole than you're intending to so be careful to keep your drill straight and this thing doesn't just take courtesy taps to get it in there you literally have to break you're chiseling out the rock so you got to push really really hard when you're doing this and you need safety glasses more than ever when you're actually hand drilling. Now in Yosemite I've hand drilled all the bolts that we did to establish the longer lines at the rostrum. That was a lot of work because they're halfway down a rock and they took about a thousand hits to drill four and three quarters of an inch by half an inch in diameter. It took a little it took about an hour per hole but they're going to be there a long time and it was worth doing it the proper way. This is the proper way in Yosemite. National parks they're not allowed to have power tools and so if you're going to install bolts please don't install bolts in Yosemite right now. It's already of an access issue because high lining has become more popular in the last 20 years. So if you are going to drill somewhere where you're not allowed to use power tools or you can't bring a drill because of weight could be an issue you can hand drill. Would you like to see a time lapse of us finishing this hole? So basically our rock peck broke and the spring here is exposed and the ball I think fell out somewhere. So this time lapse is over but uh we made it we made it that far in about 12 minutes and that's after we already started it for the video. The further down you go the more friction it gets on the sides and the longer it takes. It's really nice to have gloves it's really nice to blow the hole out as you go so you're not literally pounding dust. So you can see that this takes a lot of work but you only need three bolts per side maybe even two at a high line anchor so you can consider what you want to do. Just don't go with something with too small of a diameter use something that's pretty standard in the high line community instead of going weak on us. But that concludes what we're going to do out here now it's time to go to my kitchen. So I didn't want to make a mess in my kitchen so welcome to my garage. This is some rock dust that we collected because I want to demonstrate how to clean your hole. We're going to put some rock dust on here we're going to show you something I've learned as a painter. I paint houses and find cabinetry and when I was learning how to paint fine cabinetry I learned you really have to clean stuff just because you doesn't mean it's clean. This is a pretty powerful tool right this is what I want to do in my kitchen. You think it might be clean but it's not clean so like this that's a lot of dust on there okay so we'll just say this is my wire brush so I don't damage my cabinet here you can have to agitate it and then you have to blow it. Now I had an inspector one time come to do uh look at this complex project we were doing and I took an air compressor I wiped it down I wiped it down I made sure it was super clean and then he had a tack cloth and at the time I've never seen a tack cloth that is a sticky rag and he went across the thing and had all sorts of shit on this metal thing we were painting and I kept getting all this uh we call them tittle dumplings all this shit fell in our paint and it kept looking horrible it wasn't it couldn't pass so I learned a lot about how to clean shit. Would you like to know how I got this? This is my leftover glue from a project I did in my backyard this is a Hilti B3500 glue the really awesome stuff and it's super polished right here and all I had to do was put on something dirty glue it up and when it was dry pop it off this is really plasticky and if it doesn't have a good chemical bond to the rock that you're installing it in it's just going to basically come out in one tube you want to make sure your stuff's brushed and blown and brushed and blown a dozen times if you have to to make sure that hole is clean and you're not just blowing and you're not just brushing.