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Carrot failure @ Muline 27-Nov-2013 At 10:12:36 AM nmonteith

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On 27/11/2013 Tastrad wrote:
>As someone said on the thread, its more or less a circular piton and people
>have been falling on rusty 30 year old pitons at Arapiles for years (Snowblind,
>and that 23 of Tempests in Yesterday gully - Lunatic?), and no-one is replacing
>those.

Well Snowblind is a bad example because the piton did fall out (with the rock) and someone decked badly breaking leg/s. Then it was replaced with a ringbolt, that then that got chopped and another piton got placed in a nearby crack.

>Same with a handful of expansion bolts at Hillwood that came loose and
>pulled out. I was shown one of the offending bolts and placed it in the
>kerb outside my house, and tried to pull it out with a car. The bolt didn't
>budge, but the climbing rope snapped. So any loose expansion bolts simply
>need to be tightened, and if tightening some bolts every 10 years is the
>price to pay for using that type of bolt then fine.

I agree, expansions should be totally fine at a place like Hillwood - bomber rock, mostly vertical and with low traffic. Someone just needs to keep an eye out for spinners and re-tighten them. Did they actually "fall out" or did someone wiggle them out with their fingers when they got loose? Because I would be very surprised if they fell out! Tests that Malcom did in the 90s showed that a finger tight dynabolt in good rock will still hold a large fall. In fact, with only the last few centimetres of the bolt in the rock it still held a huge amount. The biggest problem is the nut actually loosening so much it falls off. That happens quite a bit - in fact this happened recently to anchors bolts on a route of mine I did in the early 90s.

>The carrots at Hillwood are not time bombs about to fail and hurt someone,
>and neither are the expansion bolts. They have passed the Subaru test,
>the crowbar/shifter test and the bash the shit out of it test.
>I think it should be approached on a bolt by bolt case - that if a suspect
>bolt is discovered, then replace it.

I'm just interested how the carrot bolt in question (the one I pulled from After Midnight) passed Malcolm's meticulous installation. Surely if it felt flimsy on the way in he would have replaced it? It held a big fall previously (mine!) - but why did it suddenly fail?