Best wave bolt video on the internet

wave bolts. There you go that's what it's about. There are a ton of these installed at least in the U.S. and what makes them unique is the wave shape that acts somewhat like a piton where it only goes in a little bit and then you have to smash out of it in order to get it to go in which is a nice benefit if you're trying to install something in a roof and you don't want it to fall out before the glue cures but as you see later in the video what we weren't thrilled about on those. Can you tell the difference between these two bolts? One is a wave bolt and the other is a twist bolt from BoltProducts.com. Now both of these require a half inch hole because they are six millimeter stainless steel rod that is bent into this p shape but one has a twist and one has a wave in it and the reason is because you need some way for the epoxy to hold. This turned out a little bit creepy but it has some wave bolts for arms and you can see how those pulled out a little bit later but you can see that these solid leg bolts have a spiral in them and that the twist bolt here as the spine is a twist but this titanium bolt has notches in it so epoxy or vinyl ester whatever glue you're using to install your glue in bolt doesn't stick to metal like at all it has to have some sort of mechanical way to hang on to it whether it's the shape or the notches and that's what we tested in this video. We tested 27 different wave bolts in all sorts of different ways in different rock and you will learn a lot about these and if you just trust your life to them you will understand what you are clipping to. Now Climb Tech used to sell these but you can get them at wavebolt.com and when I was looking at their website it was a little bit funny. Wave bolts are the strongest easiest to use and most cost-effective glue in rock climbing anchor available. I am the strongest man standing in this room. Are the strongest is a a big claim because you could always have a bigger bolt and did you know that this is actually the strongest bolt we've ever tested and the only reason I have one of these is I pulled it out of the glue in tension. I don't have any of the ones in sheer. I broke everything I connected to them. So this is 80 kilonewtons. This did have a big range but it does technically go up to 70 and Bolt Products twist bolt and Team Tufts new crossover bolts are all basically the same material so they all kind of break the same and if we want to stay in the half inch hole family the fixed bell shaped bolt it breaks pretty much around 50k in and these break around 40k in if they don't pull out. Spoiler alert. Now don't get me wrong they're plenty strong enough I just think it's funny they claim that. Easiest to use eh? So this goes in a 12.7 millimeter or half inch hole and this measures at 13.5. This is almost a millimeter bigger than the hole you're sticking it in. It might not be that easy to use. I think what they are trying to infer is if you use more of a traditional style glue and bolt that if you stick this in a roof or a steep rock that it's just going to slide out before it cures. So in that instance it is technically easier because it has a tight tolerance and it definitely is not coming out before the glue cures but when you have something like this titanium bolt it has a tight tolerance just right here at the neck so it goes in super easy except for the last few taps whereas this is just tight all the way down. That's how Dave from Team Tough designed the crossover bolt is to only be tight right at the part you need it to be. Most cost effective $6.75 $6.25. Now to be fair they were right when they first came out but they're still a good bolt and they're still a good price and they're still very strong. Uh that's just funny. So I just started a store and I'm pretty excited about making helpful product descriptions about every product we have in there eventually. If you guys want me to carry way bolts let me know. Hopefully they will let me do that if I just made fun of their website. I do carry Titan Climbing's bolts though you don't need titanium everywhere and I will be carrying Team Tough's crossover bolts soon after I test them and I make sure I like them. Now the store will eventually be at hownotto.com but temporarily while we are only open to our email list you have to sign up for our emails to get that domain and password to access the store. Also when you sign up you can download the Bolt & Bible PDF for free. There's a video I haven't published that you can watch and we do giveaways now every week. $100 gift cards or one of the epoxy arts or a free supporter membership that gives you a good discount for the entire year on gear that you might buy. I put a ton of work into a Saturday email so it's not about spamming you it's about telling you about the content we have and the behind the scenes and the written stuff that we're working on. Let's just jump into the tests. You can see all of this on the book of numbers in the Bolting Bible and I encourage you even if you just trust your life to bolts and you don't plan on selling them take an hour and glance through the thing. I think it'll really help you understand what you're clipping to and how to inspect it to know if it's any good. As far as a test go we installed them in AC100 glue which is a very common vinyl ester glue. It's what Climtech recommended to use with wave bolts and when you're pulling them straight out they would basically disengage from the glue at 3128 kilonewtons which is more than the carabiner you're clipping to it. So they're called wave bolts because there's there's the wave pattern is supposed to hold it in and it does hold it in as much as you need but when it comes out that wave pattern is now straight and not wavy anymore. Yeah they were waves when we put them in. It's not just about when it pulled out it's when it starts to deform. This thinner millimeter rod stock where it's not a welded p but it's continuous rod that goes all the way around that is going to start bending around six kilonewtons maybe eight. What's nice about that is you know if it's starting to you know if there's too much force that was put on it by the person before you and so that's a nice indicator it doesn't just go from looking perfect to failing. That is not a problem that I have ever observed in climbing but in highlining. Alonzo actually had put in wave bolts and when the wind picked up moved the high line over a little bit put more force on one of the three or four bolts and it bent the shit out of one of them and we have a video about that because it's important to have beefier bolts for highlines and this is strong enough from an ultimate failure perspective but not the thickness of it. Same thing goes with six millimeter twist bolts from Bolt Products. A note on bend radius specific to highliners they really like to put ropes directly through the eye. Since this creates such a narrow bend radius this is really not ideal you'll get a weaker anchor. Yeah it's nice to have a bigger bend radius if you're threading ropes through things and this is not ideal to be threading your rope through as a permanent anchor because there's not enough material here for your rope to be cutting through that metal and wearing it out. It's better to install components that can be replaced and we have a whole section about that in the climbing anchors in the New Testament of the Bolting Bible. For clipping climbing carabiners into this they're just perfect. Now a big emphasis on installing gluons is making sure the hole is clean and that's a lot of forums have talked about you don't know if they clean the hole and they're right you don't know how the installer installed it. The actual biggest concern you need to be worried about is if the glue is mixed right and sometimes yeah that's a glue thing. But what happens if the hole is dirty? Well the glue doesn't stick to the metal so the metal comes out before the glue can disengage from the side of the rock. The whole concept of cleaning a hole is that you don't have this dust layer between your glue and the rock. You want the glue to hold on to the rock and the rock needs to hold on to the rocks around it. It doesn't matter how strong your metal is if it's not attached anything well. But we found here that the wave bolt will pull out first. This is with AC100. We've also done similar tests with Liquid Rock 500, Hilti Red Glue with similar results. Other glues we don't know. So what do you think of the tight tolerance Bobby? Installing them in soft rock that tight tolerance the rock is soft enough that when you hammer it in and they have a special tool that you're supposed to use I've always used a heavy rubber mallet. It might not go in all the way or it might twist at the last little bit and look terrible even though you did everything else right when you use a half inch hole like they recommend. And it's 90 degrees out and you just stuck an AC100. Because they recommended it. And you got less than two minutes to get this thing where you want it forever. And once you start pounding in that interference fit is so tight that you're probably not going to be able to get that back out. And then you have basically a botched job. The tight tolerance is a benefit and a negative to these things. You could always buy a 14 millimeter drill bit. Or 9 16ths. Or 9 16ths, upsize the hole a little bit and just not have the tolerance. No there's still a little bit of a tolerance as much as you would need. It just goes to the last little bit and then you tap it in a little bit. See that's all you need. Yeah that's all you need is the last little bit. These are bolts that you have to actually smack in. You don't want to be smacking stainless with a steel mild steel hammer because it'll leave deposits on this part and then you'll have maybe little rust deposits on there. I don't think it's going to kill anybody but if you're putting in stainless bolts and you got little rust spots on there it looks bad. I see wave bolts as like a specialist bolt. They were designed and they're used a ton in the Rugged River Gorge which has a ton of steep climbing where it makes a ton of sense to have that tight interference fit with the softer stone. Are they great for an all-around bolt? If you follow the instructions that Climtech provided, no I don't think so. I think these twist bolts from Bolt Products are a much better option for an all-around bolt because they don't have that ridiculous interference fit. The wave bolts, the interference fit starts down here. So how strong are these bolts without any glue because that interference is so tight it feels bomber once you install it even without glue. So they were kind of sold and there was a lot of comments on forums is that the interference is so tight even as the glue is curing you can still climb on them because they're just that strong. That does not sound like a good idea. So we wanted to test that. So we pulled them straight out which albeit the strongest one was two and a half kilonewtons. You could put body weight on that. The weakest one was one and a half kilonewtons which you could still gently put your body weight on that. What was impressive in sheer it uh did pull out but in sheer we were getting uh 19 to 27 kilonewtons. Look it's smoking. Just kind of like peels it out of there. I just don't think you should be wiggling bolts while the glue is curing. If you move the bolt while the glue is curing you risk screwing that bonding up and that cure up and so you could totally compromise the placement. I've done it. You've done that? Yeah I was installing a bolt for a hand line uh that was at ground level and so I left it for like half an hour and then I I came back into that area and I moved my bag and I I bumped it and I saw it move before it was cured and it never cured. I was able to um pull it out then I redrilled the hole uh used this different bolt and now it's a bomber placement. So the most common way these are installed is you're going to be pulling in sheer and we tested that with the AC100 they recommend and we were getting some pretty awesome results. Albeit it still bends and deforms around you know six eight kilonewtons but the ultimate strength was 44 to 39 kilonewtons and that's pretty damn good. That's twice as strong as just about every carabiner you clip into that. So the beauty of glue-in bolts is they're better for softer rock so we went to test in harder rock to see if we would get different results and the results stayed the same as the softer concrete. In tension we got 32 to 34 which is is higher than we got in concrete but at the end of the day it disengaged from the glue and it pulled out but in sheer the bolt broke like it did in sheer and concrete and it pretty much got the same numbers. Like we said Climtech recommended using AC100. We wanted to see if we tested it with other adhesives if we'd get different results so we used Liquid Rock 500 and we did get different results. We like this glue because it'll fit in a normal Colt gun like the AC100. It's an epoxy which is better than a vinyl ester as as you'll see and it's a nice uh greenish gray color that is not as obvious as say the Hilti's red color which is nice if you're installing it in granite. If you're in Moab obviously it's not as helpful. The Hilti V3 500 is a really pink and red so just take that in consideration when you bolt different areas. In sheer we actually weren't able to get the actual strength of the bolt because the soft shack would break which just shows if you put a rope through the object it'll break the rope before it'll break the bolt which I guess was a good thing. But in tension we got different results. Oh broke the bolt. So we got 30 percent more strength pulling in tension did not disengage from the glue and after it deformed the shape of it then it broke the bolt at 40 kilonewtons which is very consistent with what we got in sheer. So 40 kilonewtons is roughly uh what this six millimeter rod has broken at in all of our tests. And it's the equivalent of this many elephants. Why are you pointing at me? Because I'm gonna have elephants all over this screen right here. That just shows that the epoxy is bonding to the bolt better, that the epoxy is stronger, uh epoxy is better. Does it matter? Not really. The AC100 definitely is a very versatile glue it has a very uh long range where it can cure it can cure below freezing unlike the Liquid Rock 500. If you're wearing a jacket, I mean not when I'm wearing, when Bobby's wearing a jacket you're not getting that Liquid Rock 500 out of the tube. Helty V3 500 you can but then that's a whole different setup. AC100 is more friendly when it's really cold out but when it's 100 degrees out you've got barely 60 seconds before that is cured up. I don't know if you should be bolting in 100 degree weather because it's uncomfortable. Go earlier in the morning. Now we also did these tests in Nevada in limestone in tension but mostly to test this glue that I got from Europe that's very similar to AC100. Now on the first one we used a 5 8 inch drill bit so it's way oversized than what you need so the bolt loosely went in the hole and pulling it straight out we got 31 kilonewtons. Then we put it in a half inch hole, did not clean it and only let it cure for 12 hours when it was cold out. Sounds like a piton. And the bolt broke. It did not come out. And since it was so hard to get the bolt in a half inch hole we decided to test the last one with no glue and it took 4.3 kilonewtons to get it out. Kind of just fell out sad. So that was 30 tests not 27 and we got several on the twist bolt as well so you can see how they work. If you never plan on installing a bolt I do recommend that you glance through the bolting bible if you plan on trusting your life to bolts and if you plan on installing them please read it thoroughly and remember go sign up for the emails glance through the store and see if there's anything that you need and if you are curious about another very popular bolt that we're not sure why is so popular you can go check out this other video that we did on it.