Replacing Climbing Wedge Bolts with Powers Bolts at Sugar Loaf in Tahoe

Would you like to see me Jimmy Chin Bobby Hutton while he replaces this bolt? Check it out on this episode of Vertical Bolt Replacement. Hi I'm Ryan Jinks and this is Bobby Hutton. Bobby Hutton and we are hanging off of two ropes each or one rope each and we're going to show you how to replace some what kind of bolts some old wedge bolts here at 3 8's at Sugarloaf near Tahoe and this is a real life situation being in the vertical world so you have to keep everything clipped to you and so we're going to show you as we struggle here what we're going to do. I built a neat little space net around my phone so if I dropped it it doesn't go all the way to the ground so we're able to actually film a lot of neat things now in the climbing world now that I can film with my iPhone 11 since it's such a great camera now. So we don't have too much wind over here and I'm going to shoot him while he pulls this bolt out and reuses the hole ideally so he can put in some bolts that the ASCA the American Safe Climbing Association donated. Greg Barnes mailed him a bag full of bolts for this project here at Sugarloaf and Bobby is just a guy soaked on re-bolting he doesn't get paid to do this stuff and it really helps when you donate to the ASCA so they can help fund projects like this because we just pulled out some quarter inch no three what 5 16 split shafts well you can see in another episode at the top of this and how we wedged it out and replaced it with some stainless steel power bolts if you want to check out bolting in general we have the bolting bible and you can see pretty much a to z everything there is to know about bolting and in a few months in about March 2020 we are going to have the New Testament done which is how to remove bolts and this is part of that series so we're pretty excited about all the new stuff coming out especially because we're at 300 bolt breaks deep into our bolt buster series so uh lots of stuff we're learning here and it's all on the bolting bible in the link in the description below shall we get to work yeah i don't think he wants to hang out more than i should just shut up so we are here on the side of sugarloaf and we have an old homemade hanger um attached what i believe is a 3 8th wedge bolt uh we'll find out uh i believe this is from the early 90s um and it's original with this route so first we're going to take the hanger off it's nice when it's not galled up yeah so in a perfect world you'd had wow all right you would have every tool on some sort of paracord or something right uh yeah or in an easy access bag yep all right so that's off now we're going to put the nut back on it briefly put this in our bag out of the way this out of the way for now and we're going to grab our trusty little hammer and what we're doing right now is we're going to tap the bolt back into the hole which um disengages the sleeve from the comb um which will allow us to spin it so you see how it went back in there pretty easily not all the way in though right not all the way in unless you can't get it out and need to patch it but then you're hoping the hole is deep enough that it goes all the way in yeah otherwise you're really kind of screwed so this is the the moment of truth um see if these threads match and they do all right so we are um going to do a little prep work with see how much water we can get into this hole what does the water do so the water um as the bolt spins it makes dust and then the water makes mud out of that and kind of creates a cutting solution in there which allows the as you're spinning the bolt sleeve is attached to the rock and it's scoring so the clip cannot spin yeah and you're spinning the bolt making a groove so when you do try to pull it out the clip gets stuck on that groove yeah and doesn't continue to just wedge out yes cool all right so let's get some water in there so this is a lot easier um when you're on top of a clip and can just pour it in um some recommended methods are like a squirt bottle or a sriracha bottle i don't know that i'm going to get any more than that in there yeah it's pretty hard you'd have to have some sort of a squeeze bottle to get it in there but you get to spit some water in there there's really not room in there you want you want to see that yeah yeah i think that was fantastic there you go that's the best effort like you have a squeeze bottle in your in your face so that worked out okay so then you attach that and that's just basically female on both sides right so what do you have we need because that's just tightening it on there trying to pull it out of the rock what's wrong what's wrong with that um you're engaging the coat around and you can't overpower it it wouldn't come out i mean i don't want to find out and have it snap i just was curious because we really want to reuse this the same hole yeah we're going to spin it with my rotor gotcha what's the difference between that drill and this drill um they're both spinning right this has a lot more torque than the other drill gotcha the other drill is definitely more focused on chiseling the rock or masonry this is what a mechanic would use to take off tires okay so this is a different tool yeah so this is um a coupler nut that it's the same thing but on an adapter right yeah there there is a um thread adapter in here and then this um is it an sds adapter okay that screws into the other side yeah hammer drills have sds bits which is um it has these grooves here rotary hammer rotary hammer so it has those grooves so it doesn't just fall out when it's smashing and all right and with your rotary hammer drill you set it to spin and not there we go so we're going to take it off real quick and sometimes the thread adapter stays on oh because that's for a half inch and that's a three-eighths adapter it did seem to spin a bit yeah so we're going to put some more water in there um and then try it again adding water the minimalist way you don't want to cross thread it though right nice so there's not enough threads exposed and so it's trying to pull the threads are trying to pull the bolt out which is engaging carefully your adapter so we're going to so keep tapping it in add water keep spinning it yeah i never thought about spinning it pulling it out before that makes sense yeah it's really nice to see that this process isn't as smooth as uh as you might think it might be it's nice to see us struggle a bit so you know what it's like in a real life scenario um but we're just going to keep working at it and we'll get this bolt out and uh we'll show you how we put in our other power bolts that okay tap it in but not too far yeah that's good and then you just uh you're good on water for now right oh no i'm gonna add some more okay the real crux of this whole operation is not dropping stuff down on the people below you yeah luckily we're only less we're less than 100 feet from the ground but if we were like way up on el cap that's awesome actually worked pretty good considering so this is a bolt puller tool um we didn't have much success with spinning this um there's not enough threads exposed to um hit the stop in the back of my coupler nut so it is trying to pull the nut out the threads going into the coupler nut are trying to pull the nut out which if that was shallower it could it could well okay um so basically it's just engaging the function so what we're going to try to do is see if we can pull it out without spinning here let's see what happens oh oh hold on tell us about this tool this thing looks fancy so this is a bolt pulling tool um based on a design um pioneered by a guy named greg german down colorado uh this is a much fancier c and c version made by a guy a mountain project who goes under the name cleatus okay and it basically you're just spinning this around this screw yeah and it sucks up that until you pull the bolt out okay or the bolt breaks so this is the same type of coupler nut this has the same threads on the end of this as on the end of the adapter okay so you could just use one for everything for everything or you could bring extra as in case you dropped something yeah i have dropped a couple into the river down at the crg dropped a cup coupler in a couple of couplers a couple of couplers all right so it sucks that up into it how much how much muscle do you have to just a little all the magic's happening inside snap so you're engaging the wedge and that's why that's hard otherwise the wedge would be sliding out if we were able to score the bolts um i think if i push any more i'm gonna break it break it at that point do you want to attach it with a sling okay i've pulled these i've pulled wedge bolts out without scoring them uh that's something in the bolt moving oh cool maybe that's uh shifting so i mean i've experienced wedge bolts coming out without breaking um you were using bigger ones like five they were half inch wedge bolts and i used similar wedge wedge technology this is pretty cool looks like you're really yarding on it though like yeah you're not you're not a small guy yeah so i'm watching my my threads here yeah and all of that popping is going from down here nothing's jumping or anything here yeah that would suck i mean pretty cool if this just skip the scoring you never have to work that's hard scoring yeah if it's scored that's good to know you want to take it off and check real quick or just keep going just keep going it'll like you don't have to go much further before yeah see exactly there you go oh success neato you got the water in there yeah that's pretty impressive so that's the hole we're gonna drill it out a little bit bigger so we can put our half inch power bolt stainless steel this time and that will last how long do you think that'll last i mean more than 20 years yeah i've removed uh bolts that were put in about 30 years ago with a stainless hanger and the only in this area and the only effect was the plated steel bolt had rusted and stained the stainless yeah but the stainless yeah okay so it should last our lifetime um i mean if you're near the ocean you got to put in uh titanium or like areas that have a lot of corrosion but out here i mean you do have wet winters but it's not um like a salty corrosive environment so stainless and plx should be uh super good enough so our next step is to drill out the hole enlarge the hole for our uh new bowl did your drill bit get stuck if you're drilling a smaller hole um if they're too close in diameter it might um modern drill bits with this carbide tip are less acceptable to that okay uh we will see in a moment we'll see i am going to make sure i edit that into the video my feet completely slipped and i just smashed my phone against the rock with my chest being jimmy chen is hard oh jimmy chenning is hard jimmy chen would feel more like this though and you would like exhale very serious we'll do a whole spoof on uh free solo later so you might ask uh why can't you just rehole you reuse this hole you just pulled the bolt out of it um with you're worried about um it's if you're trying to put a three-eighths bolt back in a three-eighths hole that other bolt has been in there as you pulled it out it may have done damage to the hole so your new bolt might not engage as well okay so you do want to upgrade size or do you just want to drill a fresh three-eighths no you'd want to upgrade the size okay so it's good we use half inch yeah okay how's that look straight straight's good so between spinning and drilling you want to switch back to the hammer drill you won't get very far otherwise nice better to have it a little too long than too shallow so i put these a little bit too long but if you have a powers bolt too shallow yeah show us on the drill bit so my my goal is to get to the thread that's kind of my measuring um that's what those look like yeah and you went to about right here uh did i yep okay i think so yeah so yeah if you put that in something that's too shallow you're gonna be hating life so after you drill it this is like for those bolts you need to clean out the holes even with tightened concrete screws um you want to get you want to get the dust out yeah yeah but this is most important for gluing but it's also important for mechanical bolts two brushes and two blows are probably good right yeah with glue it's um recommended to do three or four times what kind of uh let me see the air can duster ozone safe this is pretty neat how many bolts can you get out of that like of what you're doing right now half inch uh 25 or 30 oh wow that's totally worth bringing doesn't seem too heavy to carry air it's nice to have that bag on you yeah so these bolts were in the bag but then i couldn't find anything in the bag okay so this is the the new bolt um before we put it in um we want to just make sure it's pretty snug nothing's loose here um but we don't want this cone starting to engage into the sleeve because that is what makes these stay in the rock yeah what's nice is these power bolts make sure you use stainless steel you can see here it says ss 304 um these don't rise like uh wedge bolts do the tighter you make a wedge bolt the higher this part is sticking out um it's nice when these stay flush because you get a little bit more working room when you stick carabiners inside of the hanger these are uh powder coated you know i'm not sure they i think they're powder coated um and they're meant to camouflage and not be so shiny on the rock um but they are a stainless steel hanger nonetheless so and these have some asca branding on there and then on the top underneath the powder coating it says inox which is another word for stainless that's i learned has a french derivative all right so let's get it started in the hole all right right before we get it all the way snug um we want to kind of orient it in the correct way right behind that washer there's a little arrow pointing straight up it's behind the washer though behind the washer that's i'm pretty stoked this uh worked out yeah almost lost hope there bobby so um these bolts take i think 20 25 something something like that torque pounds and if you're using a little wrench it that's uh the equivalent of like two grunts you got to pull pretty hard when we use the torque wrench we were shocked how much 25 torque pounds now you'd whip on that oh totally cool maybe uh maybe we'll whip for science later on um we're gonna go down and replace oh i see one right there yep all right let's go do the next one see if it spins okay so we got some fancy redirects going on and we are at our next bolt so go for it bobby so this is another homemade hanger with a rusty 3-8 swedge bolt so let's see if we can get this one to spin yeah hopefully nice you're lucky when it's not so rusty that the nut and the bolt are one piece why don't you just put it on first and not pound any in because that way you might get it to engage is that an option so the cone is engaged right now so i'm wanting to disengage the sleeve around the cone okay nice i guess it'll suck back out if you if it wants yeah if i make a joke will you spit out your water if i don't make a joke will you spit out your water if it's funny enough will it come out of your nose onto the bolt what did the glue and say to the mechanical bolt if i get this going fast enough can i hear you ah nuts that's a bad one how long you been working on that one i didn't put any effort into it oh it's actually doing it's supposed to i'm going to take it off real quick and squirt some more water but these bolts are camouflaged we should leave them in all right so a trick is to move it in and out which sloshes the slurry of dust and water um over the parts okay and that grit allows the cone to cut into the bolt a little bit better and let's do one more cycle sloshing your slurry oh you do want to do more you really want to spin the **** out of this yeah got it because you're you're cutting into metal yeah got it with your liquid sandpaper yeah all right now we're going to try to pull it out with this fancy tool thread that on there where can people get something like this so this one is pretty much made to order um there's a gentleman on mountain project goes by name please we've used from colorado somewhere uh that has these machines okay um we'll put his information in and then the description also greg german has a lot of resources on mountain project as well as youtube on how to make your own okay i wasn't feeling technologically inclined enough when i first started this uh so you want to attempt that yeah it's much nicer if you just buy these things um it's not nothing's super complicated on them it's just kind of a bitch part to work together um i saw a video of access fund had a machine similar to this yeah you just basically got something that can hit the rock and stop push against the rock and a screw that's pulling it out i'm worried that i don't have this threaded in enough there we go cool oh that's butter oh that's way better than the last bolt oh damn that's impressive so do we see any scoring going on here it would be underneath there yeah there you go there's fresh metal right there oh sick okay yeah there is we showed you the how not to version first i should clean off uh the lenses there so another way to check your bolt depth is using your brush so notice we were right at the edge of the nylon strands there plenty of room yeah i have a feeling it'd be hard to pull that out before you even torque on it did we yeah oh no torque the plate of steel happens once gotcha it was weaker but it was still like 18 kilonewtons yeah yeah check out our bolt buster uh videos we're releasing our brake test videos all the time so i think my drill bit is um time to get a new one it worked just fine for the last one but this one it's too tight you think yeah it's too tight yeah you had to hit it in pretty hard did you just knuckle yourself oh god so you literally have skin in the game you have less skin in the game