Alpine bolt reccomendations

Protection bolt on an alpine wall:

A protection bolt on B.O.F. SHould have been stainless.

Fixed bolted anchor on an Alpine Wall:

Anchor on B.O.F. One bolt is SS, one plated...

So which would you feel better about placing or clipping?
Which of these is going to be a lot of work to replace?

Those are not optimal for placing with the thought of REPLACING.

That is hardware store garbage tony.

Button heads.

Easy to place, easy to remove and drill out to 3/8ths.

This is what I made for the back country, SS hangers with powers buttonheads.

1/4" kit

Well, if you are putting that kind of thought and commitment into it, then you are doing something better than some do.
In the 1980's we had a lack of info (IE galvanic corrosion due to washers or hangers). Now people know, but still continue to place junk sometimes.

I advocate some forward thinking. Beats the crap out of litter.

I'm not going to go too much further than that since I am not a bolt 'expert' but yeah, I am broadly saying that thinking beyond one's self should be done before installing hardware.

Tony B wrote:Protection bolt on an alpine wall: Fixed bolted anchor on an Alpine Wall: So which would you feel better about placing or clipping? Which of these is going to be a lot of work to replace?

Just as an FYI Tony, the bolt on the right in your second photo isn't stainless, it's a normal plated powers 5-piece, you can tell by those three lines on the bolt head, those mean that the bolt is a grade 5 plated steel bolt and you won't find them on a stainless bolt.

I'm with you though... if your going to do something you might as well do it right. If that means spending extra time during the FA to place good hardware great, but if do to time constraints you have to place junk, at least go back up and swap it out for good hardware ASAP.

There's no doubt you can save time by drilling 1/4" on lead. However after placing hundreds of 1/4" which I returned to replace - sometimes within the hour, sometimes as much as 8 years later - I will say they are a crapshoot (but with pretty good odds). Two of my bolts failed with nearly zero force, far less than body weight, and one of those was less than 1 year old (the other was 8 years on the rock). Likewise a friend's 1/4" just fell off the following year with the weight of a draw jiggling it (and he's placed more 1/4" than I have). The recent accident in Owens showed that 5/16" buttonheads also just fracture/snap in the hole sometimes. The old school guys talk about rumors/memories of "bad batches" of 1/4", 5/16", and even 3/8" button-head compression bolts.

The Fixe 8mm buttonheads (8mm not 5/16" which is slightly too small) are junk metal, very soft. If you are lucky enough to get one in without smashing it into a pancake, at least it shouldn't snap easily.

Short stainless 3/8" stud bolts are in some ways the best quick permanent bolt. However when using very short stainless stud bolts (2 1/4" total length so the hole depth is about 1 1/2" - 1 3/4"), the hole must be very well drilled, and you really have to watch out for cratering - which can happen in nearly any rock. If you do use them, I like to use 316ss bolt and a 316ss hanger (such as Petzl, Climbtech, Fixe marine grade).

Another option is to make the short 3/8" x 1 7/8" "4-piece" Power-Bolts in stainless by buying 3/8 x 2.25" and then swapping the bolt cores for short stainless bolt cores (2" instead of 2.25") & discarding the blue compression sleeve. This is expensive and you really have to watch the bolt torque, it doesn't snug up slowly like a 2.25". I decided I didn't really like that option and went back to 2.25" after trying it a few times.

You can use the much cheaper Grade 5 carbon steel 3/8 x 1 7/8" Power-Bolts (if they are still made?), those are really easy to remove since you can always grab the sleeve with needle nose pliers after disengaging the cone after unscrewing the bolt and hanger (and then you screw the bolt back in the cone and funk out the cone). But they will rust.

I have to disagree with mucci on using HSS bits for 3/8" - I've found that they tend to dull and get stuck/snap too easily, and they don't seem to drill that much faster for 3/8". However for 1/4" HSS bits drill WAY faster (literally 2-3 times faster), so maybe I just had bad HSS bits or tip angle, etc. Still I tend to just use SDS bits for quick/light stuff where you're hoping not to drill, since it's way lighter, easier to change bits, and the bits are super strong. Plus that in alpine you generally are trying hard not to need to drill.

Considering all factors, it really is just best to go 3/8" to begin with unless you are staring at a desperate stance on lead and you intend to replace immediately - but even then you really just can't fully trust 1/4" even when freshly placed (hence the doubled-original-bolts that were fairly common in key placements back in the day!).

I've placed a number of 1/4" x 1.75" Stainless Hilti KB3s on Alpine granite using the Moses hanger. Beautiful little setup. An engineer did a fair bit of pull testing on these (search Supertopo) and they were consistently strong enough.

FWIW it was on terrain that will never be a trade route and where commitment and a certain amount of risk management were required. People (online) will in all likelihood consider it wrong but it was appropriate for that particular situation. Not every route needs to be dummy proof.

mec.ca/product/5010-280/hil…

There's a good and relevent thread here mountainproject.com/v/where…