UKC

Hi guys,
Has anyone got any experience of removing resin bolts? I need to take out some poorly placed resin bolts and replace them, i have managed to take out the few really really bad ones, but they are some that are being stubborn. I'm reluctant to drill in next to them and make a gaping hole so if anyone has any other suggestions i'd be grateful.
All the best.

In reply to Luuuke:

Speak to the original bolter and ask them to drill them out and patch the holes. It was them that made them.

In reply to Luuuke:

Not being a bolter this is just a suggestion not based on experience, but in what seems to be the best tradition of UKC, here goes:- have you tried drilling the actual bolt using increasing sized HSS bits?

In reply to Luuuke:
It's easy to remove resin bolts and re-use the same hole. You need some tool like a crowbar or ice axe that you can insert into the eye of the bolt. Hammer the bar anti-clockwise to extract the bolt. Hard at first but easy once it starts turning. You can now re-drill the hole and glue in a replacement bolt

In reply to Luuuke:

If by poorly placed you mean badly installed then chop the old bolt with an angle grinder and drill for the new bolt directly above. If they really are poorly placed then you want to be installing the new ones somewhere else anyway so just chop and patch if possible.
Removing resin bolts can be extremely difficult, that is the idea really! Ignore the poster suggesting twisting them out, to meet the torque resistance requirements nearly all modern bolts normally shear off.

In reply to Luuuke:

The best way is to use an industrial grade diamond tipped core drill. There is some info on am American bolting website somewhere. You can then reuse the same hole. If replacing using single stem eye bolts, make sure to notch the eye into the rock.

In reply to Luuuke:
I'm not sure but I think I've heard you can heat the bolts with a blow torch to soften the resin and then pull the bolts out.

In reply to Luuuke:

http://www.bolt-products.com/SustainableBolting.htm

This page mentions using heat to remove bolts that use certain types of resin glue.

In reply to DDDD:


The information is on my website, the link is the same one given above. We no longer import the core drills but can tell you what to buy.
Do NOT notch the eye of the new bolt since you prevent the same method being used again.

In reply to DDDD:



Regrettably with with most resins and bolts this doesn´t work, to satisfy the construction industry´s need for fire resistance the resins nowadays don´t soften with heat as easily as we would like. Even if a suitable resin was used stainless steel is a very poor conductor of heat so to get the bottom of the bolt hot takes a long time, a very long time if you are hanging on a rope on a breezy day!

In reply to jimtitt:

To those telling him how to replace the bolts with new bolts in the same holes that's not what he wants to do, he wants to remove them completely because he thinks they are in the wrong place.

In reply to Luuuke:
Drill a lot of small holes in the resin surrounding the bolt, then twist and pull. Fill the old hole with glue and cover with dust from the new bolt hole.

In reply to Steve Crowe:

What Steve Crowe said !

In reply to steve taylor:

I have removed (amongst others) petzl glue ins, staples, and petzl antivol (anti theft) bolts.

The staples needed a home made extractor consisting of two legs and an M20 threaded bar and big spanner. Takes no prisoners.

Dinners on table, will give more info later

In reply to steve taylor:

Very nice pork steak, thanks Jen.

The glue-ins I have removed only needed "cracking " , rotated with a long bar thro the eye, then rotated to screw out. In poor sandstone I have even managed it with a nut key. A metre long bar will remove a lot of bolts but maybe not Jim's !

The Antivol bolt was the hardest to remove. In good granite but fortunately at the top of a Lakes crag so easy to get more leverage than hanging off a rope.

I put a cold chisel thro the hanger eye, steel packer plates tight to the hanger underneath the chisel, a 3 metre length of scaffold tube to extend the chisel. I rolled up my sleeves for a big push towards the rock but only finger tip pressure was needed. I had achieved so much lever arm advantage probably 500 to 1 that no bolt could resist. Stretched the hanger about 10mm.

I will take a shorter tube next time, the 3 metre one felt quite heavby by the time I got it up the hill.

I have a theory that any problem can be solved for no cost with old climbing gear and building site skip contents.

In reply to Rick Graham:

Well true enough, a lot of the bolts out there you can just pull out with brute force. The lower limit is obviously nothing but for something decent you´ll need ca 17kN which is certainly doable with a crowbar, up near the better end of the market you´ll be in the 70kN level which ain´t so easy especially on a rope. I´ve an 80kN hydraulic puller which gets most things out and an even bigger one which gets nearly all the rest. Some just snap off though which is back to square one really.
The big hassle is with well-installed bolts as they progressively stretch and break out a shallow circular piece of rock which looks appalling so the trick is drill in a few cm with a very small drill (4mm) around the shaft to weaken the glue bond there which helps quite a bit.
Heating and pulling is a bit of a disaster as the stainless weakens considerably when it´s warmer and the eyes just break off.

Incidentally, if anyone uses the drill-all-round technique which is pretty common for replacement you should note that the holding power of the glue falls off drastically with a small bolt/big hole combination due to the shrinkage. A 10mm shaft bolt in a 16mm hole doesn´t get anywhere near the standard and we are struggling with our 12mm ones as well. More than 2mm glue line and you´re off the parameters for the normal resins and you need a large gap version which is virtually unobtainable in cartridges. Using plastic sieve inserts which are sold for hollow blocks makes things even worse!
The only solutions are quick-setting cement if the bolt is suitable,a bigger diameter bolt or drill deeper the standard size for a longer one.

In reply to Rick Graham:


Before anybody gets the impression I am anti bolting.

I have placed a lot more bolts than chopped/removed.

They just need to be on the right crags/routes.

In reply to jimtitt:

Hi Jim,
Interesting discussions. A good glue-in bolt seems pretty hard to shift then?

From experience, I've no doubt that glue-in bolts last far, far longer than mechanical/expansion bolts and are possibly better for other reasons too. But, recently I've seen some interesting videos about techniques to remove mechanical bolts that seem to allow reuse of the holes, possibly indefinitely? Is this really possible, or is it BS in reality?

Jim, in the looong-term, what’s your view about sustainable bolting? Why not mechanical bolts, which don’t last as long but could be ‘managed’ by planned replacement, rather than glue-ins which seem to require destructive removal, or chopping and then a poor attempt at camouflage?

I know managed bolt ‘replacement’ doesn't currently happen (though some local bolt funds can do a reasonable job of bolt ‘substitution’) but I’m talking about the long-term and things could/will change, no? This seems to be a simple(but not easy?) question of engineering a reasonably long lasting but wholly removable bolt technology?
Is this possible? Is a removable ‘legacy bolt’ <ahem> just a pipe dream if we want decent, i.e certified, holding power?

PS in medium term I really like twisted leg glue ins

In reply to innes:

Just what would your definition of medium or long term be exactly?
At what point do we stop caring? The way I see it is with a well placed modern glue-in that is not abused i.e punters top roping directly through them,they should last generations. Will people still be jumping in cars and jets to the crags then? Should the Victorian’s have built wider gage rails and tunnels for double deckers?
Perhaps Jim may reply and give a guesstimate of lifespans.
Also the given space of rock for a bolt will alter, become hollow or eroded. Hold lose may alter the sequence and clip positions so reusing the same spot my not be possible anyway.

In reply to kristian:

Long term = centuries? Take your pick I guess.... but many of the sport routes I climb on are already decades old.
The point I was trying raise is that if there is an indefinite solution to reusing bolt holes then it makes sense to adopt it now surely?
Don't get me wrong, I like resin bolts and clip lots of them every week.
However, the construction industry has been making attempts to improve its sustainability through 'design for disassembly' etc. Glue ins seem to fall short on this front?
There is at least one climbing equipment manufacturer marketing semi-permanent but removable expansion bolts. This seems to make a lot of sense to me given the above discussions.

In reply to innes:

Yes I know what you mean and there is logic to it. In reality who is going to schedule a replacement for these "medium term" bolts. Here in the Peak it is hard enough getting volunteers to replace the first clumps of rust. The routes that do get the treatment tend to be the popular and clean ones.
Drill it, glue it, forget it. Done!
If they last 50 years then I'd be very happy with that.

In reply to Luuuke:
I have done this before. You need to drill 2 small holes at each side of the existing bolt. These 2 small holes (4mm)will be parall to the bolt and will break up the glue. Then take a long bar put it theough the bolt eye and twist. The more of the glue you break up with 2 small holes the easier it will be to twist the bolt. To cover up the shitty hole left behind, pack the hole with dust and grit from drilling. Then put some glue mixed with dust (to color it) and plaster it over the hole.

In reply to innes:








I´m involved to a certain amount in the re-bolting stuff in the USA but not all you see tells the whole story. As a generalisation the mechanical bolts you can (relatively) easily remove are ones that haven´t suffered badly from corrosion, ones that a rusted to death usually just break off when you try to remove them. This is probably going to be the case with Legacy bolts the same as all the others, once corrosion has got into the thread/cone junction it´ll sieze up and snap off when you try to get it out. Basically a lot of the time if you can remove them you didn´t need to.
The same with glue-ins, most you can just pull out but those are the ones that don´t break so why replace them?
The sleeve-type bolts favoured by the Americans are not popular in Europe for good reasons and I personally am not a fan of relying on a bolt whose holding power is determined by the torque preload the bolt has on the day I use it. Wedge bolts are fit and forget which appeals to me!

Climbers want bolts to stay in the rock, having them removable is actually easy so long as the installers don´t mind drilling bigger holes and paying more. Currently these are two things installers don´t like.

The way bolting is organised and funded at the moment any concept of rolling maintenance schedules is a pipedream, even countries like Germany where there is an organised commitment to fund and maintain bolts the choice is glue-ins anyway and given their lifespan compared with rock-climbing in general it seems pointless to look too far forward. Cheap flights to Kalymnos will probably not exist in 50 years time so worrying about bolts lasting after that is a bit pointless in many ways, in fact looking at the history of trendy sport climbing areas in Europe there is a high probability that in 20 years time Kalymnos for example will be a half-abandoned wasteland and we´ll have moved on to somewhere new.
Since the inexorable rise in standards will have made the majority of routes in Europe beginners routes they will all need rebolting to climbing wall standards anyway.

The biggest improvement to bolt life and replacement is for climbing to organise a much stronger community involvement to raise the finance so that new routes are bolted using suitable material and so that the manpower to do maintenance is available. The current system whereby all the load and cost falls on a few is unsustainable.

In reply to jimtitt:

Cheers for the reply Jim. Good knowledge there, as always. Seems like a classic catch 22 of they're only hard to remove when they're in need of removal. Outside of a commercial climbing centre-type arrangement <shudders> I can't ever see us being smart enough to manage replacement on that basis.


Wow! I could see those american bolts are different but hadn't realised that point about how they work. Sod that! Having done quite a bit of sport climbing in the US that's quite shocking actually.

That's game over from my perspective: glue ins are the way forward. Thankfully, I watched places like the Red getting re-equipped a few years ago by what looked to me like good bolts....


Amen.

Thanks again for the reply.

In reply to kristian:


Agreed. C'est la vie!

In reply to innes:

It´s all a bit complicated really! Various countries and continents are at different stages in the bolt experience and there´s a tendency for each to work on their own solutions and pioneer their own style. The British effectively bypassed the whole 1/4"/3/8" drive-in stuff as did the continentals and also the nasty collection of stuff the French initially used. The Germans started at an enormously high standard and gradually refined down to the current systems. The Japanese are still crazed. FFME bolts are a scandal, Muni bolts a dubious proposition and so on.

The multi-piece sleeve bolts started to get going in Europe but it was soon noted that any corrosion was where you can´t see it and that freeze-thaw pushed them out of the hole. The bolt head also looks the same as the dodgy rubbish which was in widespread use in the 80´s which doesn´t give confidence.
The wedge bolt came along which is cheaper, requires a smaller hole and effectively idiot proof, so long the hole is the right size the installation torque is irrelevant. The big benefit with this type is tightening it tells you exactly how much force it takes to pull it out which is not the case with sleeve bolts.
Things like the Legacy bolt are in some ways a good concept in that removal requires no special equipment and an interesting addition to the market but the material chosen by ClimbTech is certainly a step backwards from the usual in Europe and the price absolutely prohibitive for normal use anyway. A third of the price, made from 316 or 2205 and in metric sizes they might be interesting.
At the end of the day the technical solutions have always been available but despite much of what one reads on the internet the will of the climbing community to apply them is lacking. High spec bolts don´t sell because medium-tech ones are dirt cheap! A titanium bolt-in with hanger will set you back $40.00 which isn´t really encouraging either.

Glue-ins are good because you can buy higher specced bolts much cheaper than bolt-in and as long as the installation is done correctly they have a longer lifespan, some of the original 1967 stainless Bühler bolts are still in use today and there are plenty of even older cemented lumps of iron still doing good service.

The initial emphasis, if improving the general bolt condition is the objective is to start by removing any incentive for any more sub-standard bolts being installed, peer pressure and education is slowly working but there are other more effective methods as well. If climber safety is the objective then teaching them to tie knots properly is the better thing to do!

In reply to jimtitt:


Knowing the Yorkshire scene, these are very important issues!


Hence discussion like this are worthwhile - I don't frequently post on forums, but this has been interesting and I've learned something new, thank you!