Breaking and Entering sports plated steel 5-piece bolts and stainless hangers; these are good candidates for replacement. The first bolt (which protects the crux of the 5.10- variation) has been loose for some time.
This line has two starts one which keeps the grade at 5.8 and one that bumps up to hard 5.9/easy 5.10, the crux of which is right off the ground basically. The bolts were placed such that the really benefit the harder variation, even when the climbing eases. With that in mind and after suggestions from others to address that, when replacing the hardware I re-positioned the second and third bolts to be more easily clippable from the easier variation but still being clippable from the harder variation. As well, the third bolt was poorly placed in a dish that caused cross-loading of a draw. That has been moved up so that is no longer an issue. A new 4th bolt placement is about a foot and a half left; this is more in line with the bolts below and above.
The original bolts that were replaced were over-tightened, which was confirmed by the state of the blue compression ring. The first bolt’ss hex head was completely stripped and I wasn’t able to even attempt to get a socket head to not pop off of it. In a last bid effort I tried to funk the bolt and was surprised to find that I was able to easily pull it with a hammer and funkness device. This makes me wonder if the bolt was re-tightened multiple times by well-intentioned but un-educated climbers over its service life. 5-piece bolts are really sensitive to their torque setting, and if they are over-tightened it can actually damage the expansion sleeve.
It’s hard to imagine that that first bolt wasn’t a spinner if it was able to be funked out of the hole so easily. That’s a little scary to think about, as I’ve personally belayed a climber that fell on that bolt! Thankfully pull-out and shear are different forces that affect the bolt in different ways!
Update: The anchor and protection bolts have been replaced with 12mm Bolt Products glue-ins donated by the ASCA.
