Bolt Buster ⅝” wedge highline bolts tested in sandstone
6 Video Views·Jun 6, 2020
Terry Bolts or ⅝” zinc plated wedge bolts with chain were installed everywhere at the fruitbowl in moab utah before being replaced with glue in bolts. Many highliners were curious how strong they were so we tested them! With Matheus Waeny and Nick McPherson.
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Are you bent out of shape?
Watch us pull out some 5.8 inch fatties
out of some sandstone on this episode
of How Not To Bolt Bust.
Hi, I'm Ryan Jinks and welcome to my gear room.
Today we're gonna talk about some BFBs,
big ******* bolts.
That's based on a climbing joke
in case you didn't get that.
Anyways, these are 5.8 inch
zinc plated red head wedge bolts,
missing the clip at the bottom in this case.
And we put them in sandstone to test them
in tension and in shear,
which we will share both in this video
here for Bolt Busters.
Because this is what is installed
at the Fruit Bowl in Moab, Utah,
where we have a Highline Festival called GGBY.
And that is kind of, you know,
interesting to us on how strong these are
considering that they're not great bolts.
If you're going to install climbing bolts
that people are going to depend their lives on
for years to come,
please use stainless steel or titanium
if you're near the ocean.
But in this case, these are zinc plated bolts.
It is in the desert,
but over time it still does rust.
Now this is one of the bolts
that was removed by some friends
at the Fruit Bowl to replace with gluon bolts,
which definitely perform better.
And it is not corroded poorly
considering it's a dry environment,
but the chains are rusted
and it's just like,
it's going to last forever in those conditions
if it was stainless steel.
So if we're not having to replace bolts every few years,
it's going to be better for the longevity
of the areas that we're climbing and highlining in.
So this is a 10 inch long redhead,
five eighths inch wedge bolt.
Most of what we tested in the sandstone
was seven inches long.
Then we did a couple that were 10 inches long.
But in this case, we tested these in sheer,
pulling sideways,
and we got 51 kilonewtons,
52 kilonewtons,
and also 52 kilonewtons.
So I am impressed with the results
of what I would call cheap, shitty bolts.
They are pretty consistent.
They all broke around the same.
I am pretty happy with the fact
that these were consistently above 50 kilonewtons.
However, this is a five eighths inch bolt.
It's like grade two steel.
It's not a quality metal.
And so we tested some stainless steel,
which stainless steel can be softer
or weaker than zinc by much.
And we still got a higher reading on those bolts.
For example, we had some threaded rod stainless steel
from Lorenzo DeMuro,
who gave them to us
because he used those in some Arizona highlines
that he did.
And while we tried to break them,
we ended up breaking a lot of our shackles
and soft shackles and carabiners,
trying to break the damn things.
And we finally got the chains to break
at 66 and 63 kilonewtons.
So now we know what the breaking strength of the chains
that are used on these bolts,
but it looked like those bolts
still had a lot of life left in them
because they were a higher,
it's a higher grade material
than just a grade two zinc plated bolt.
Now all these forces are like twice as strong
as any carabiner you're gonna own
and more force than you can physically put on anything,
even if you stuck an elephant on it.
So it's all pretty good.
However, cyclic loading can be an issue in sandstone
because we're just pulling a brand new bolt once.
But if you pull, pull, pull, pull,
you can actually start to cone out the bottom
and wear out that contact point
between the clip and the rock.
And that's the problem with the longevity of these bolts.
It's not just this isolated test that we're doing.
Before we get into the tension tests,
which are super interesting,
wanna say that this episode is sponsored by no one.
No one sponsors Bolt Busters.
I pay out of my pocket everything we do here
so we can stay biased and opinionated
based on our own opinions.
However, if you go to brewjuno.com,
I started a coffee business with my friends.
We're using really high grade coffee beans
and freeze drying them.
So we're making really awesome coffee convenient.
It's pretty rare that companies do that
and it's turning out to be pretty popular.
So go to brewjuno.com and help support us by getting amped.
So we pulled one of these bolts out
that was seven inches long at only 32 kilonewtons.
And then we pulled the longer one,
the one I have here in my right hand, 51 kilonewtons.
Now I really don't know if that just happens
to be the luck of the draw on where you installed them
versus the fact it was longer
because the contact point is still the same
and once it releases, it goes woo
like you can see in the videos.
So for sandstone, I'm actually pretty impressed
by how strong the rock is.
However, sandstone just kind of turns to sand
when you rub it in your hands.
So this isn't great rock, but it isn't the worst rock.
There are a lot worse areas like Zion National Park,
my friends told me is like powder.
When you drill into it, it just,
your drill just falls into it.
And that is where things like this could kill somebody.
It's very important to use glue and bolts, stainless steel.
Do they even sell zinc plated glue and bolts?
I didn't think so.
So glue in stainless bolts or titanium
if you're near the ocean is awesome for soft rock
and you would want longer ones the shittier your rock is.
So it has, because your rock can fail before your bolt.
So we were super curious and we tested this in wet rock.
The rock had a bowl shaped area,
look at those craters and the black ring.
So we're like, okay, so we installed the bolts
in one of those and filled it up with water,
letting it sit for two days,
making sure the rock was super, super wet.
And the big long 10 inch bolt being pulled in tension
broke at 23.92 kilonewtons.
It actually did not break, it pulled out of the rock.
And that just shows you, it's not just the bolt
or the hanger or your rope,
but how everything works together.
And so if it rains at GGBY, we kind of let things dry out
before we let people get back on the high lines.
However, glue and bolts did actually do pretty good
in wet sandstone, but you do want to play it safe
and you don't want people slipping off a cliff.
So the positive side of using chains on your threaded rod
is that you can thread rope through it,
which is what we use for our highline anchors.
This isn't as applicable necessarily for climbing
unless it's maybe a climbing anchor,
but we like to thread our rope in directly
so we can eliminate having to bring quick links
for every bolt.
However, the problem with that
is you have to put four washers on this side
in order to lift it up high enough
for this to be 90 degrees.
And in that case, you end up pulling higher up on the bolt.
So if the ground is here, you're pulling here
instead of flush with the rock,
and that will reduce its strength.
I wonder if we use a normal hanger on something like this,
if we could actually get more strength out of the bolt.
You can see how bent this got
because the chains were pulling on the top.
So that's a lot of data to go over in one episode.
You can check the chart out right here
while I tell you why we do bolt busters.
We want to help educate everyone who uses bolts,
not just installs them, on how they work,
how they don't work,
what's the best thing to last a long, long time.
We want to make sure that if people are putting in bolts
that other people are going to depend their lives on,
that they're safe and that they last a long time
so our climbing and highline areas
don't turn into Swiss cheese.
We're almost done releasing the 2020 version
of the Bolting Bible,
which is going to have a lot more information,
a lot more pages, and entire additional books
about bolting, including the New Testament,
which is how to remove bolts, which is super fun.
Bobby Hutton's been teaching me a lot
about how we remove them,
and we are actually going to have some episodes out
of us removing them so you can see the process
and see why it's a pain in the ass to do so
so we shouldn't put in bolts
that need to be replaced in our lifetime.
So go check out the Bolting Bible.
If you know more than I do, there's a good chance you do,
please tell me if we can make the Bolting Bible better
because I'm just a collector of information
more than an expert on this stuff.
Why do we test this stuff
if companies are already testing things?
Well, I believe we're one of the few people
that don't sell bolts who are testing bolts,
and we are testing them in ways that we actually use them
or misuse them because sometimes
bolts do get misused regularly,
and we want to know what the RBS is
or the realistic braking strength compared to the MBS.
I find that MBS, or minimum braking strength,
is a rubber ruler that it's really hard
to standardize things, I understand that,
but they are trying to isolate and standardize in a lab
and give a number you can compare one piece of gear
to another piece of gear with,
but that's not real life all the time,
and so we're discovering that there's a broad range,
especially with welded products, on what they break at.
Now, everything generally breaks,
at least the new stuff we're putting in,
higher than you could ever put force on
using it in any normal or not normal way.
Your carabiner will break before these bolts,
your ropes will break before your carabiners break,
and your belay loop's gonna break before your rope breaks.
So it's interesting to see how they all interact together,
and that's what we're trying to do here
on our Slack Snap episodes and Bolt Busters.
And something super helpful is if you click the like button
and not troll me for damaging rocks.
But if you do troll me, that helps too,
because the more comments I get,
the more views I'm gonna get.
However, we did not damage rock.
We had probably 5% of our tests cone out a few spots.
We angle grinded and removed everything that we installed,
which is better than people who put them in
and leave them in.
And so we're trying to test an area that you'll never see.
No one will ever go to this area.
And then covered our areas, things up with glue,
put dust on it.
You can't tell we were there.
We're trying to test this in concrete in my backyard,
which you'll see in future episodes,
in order to reduce how much we're doing outside,
but we have to do real testing and real rock
in order to see the things that we saw in this episode.
Make sure you hit the like, follow, and subscribe
on our Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube,
because we are posting stuff all the time.
Cheers.
Hey, thanks for watching, but please don't be an idiot
and try to go highlining or climbing
or repeat the stunts you see on this channel
without going with someone who knows what they're doing.
These sports come at a very high risk,
but can be done safely.
And that's what this channel is devoted to,
helping you understand what you're looking at
when you do get the chance to learn from somebody in person.
We have tons of resources.
They're all free and they're all at hownottohighline.com.
We have the Bolting Bible, which we just finished,
the 2.02 version, 2020 version,
and it's 133 pages, 426 photos,
216 links that work.
It's super thorough if you want to learn bolting.
And we also have Highline University International,
which is all free courses now,
and Highlining 101 is done,
how to use a highline that's already rigged.
And we are doing the anchors and rigging
and rope jumping and space nets and more simultaneously
with a large group of people
now that we've made this open source.
It's gonna be just like the Bolting Bible.
It's gonna have lots of photos, lots of links,
and literally everything on the topic.
We also have a way to get you plugged
into the Slackline community.
We have a list of Facebook groups on slackademics.com
that you can hit Control F, find your area,
and find the groups that all coordinate
when and where they're going Slacklining
so you can get connected with our Slack family.
Another free book we have on hownottohighline.com
is The Book of Slack.
There is some Slack religious stuff at the beginning
because we think that's funny,
but the rest of it is about flow state
and about the history of Slackline.
It's a thorough, deep book.
It's awesome.
Go check that out.
And no, I don't make money on YouTube.
You need millions of subscribers
just to make a living at it.
I do this for a fun hobby
and because I really want the information
that I wish I had when I started
available for the next generation.
We believe that safe information should not be withheld
for only those who can afford it,
but it does cost thousands of dollars a year
to run this channel.
Bullbusters cost me like $10,000,
Slack's not being cheap,
and the websites cost money and yada yada.
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