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Comment by lukeinator42 | Hacker News Reader

This would be great for other use cases too like climbing bolts and anchors in coastal areas. Lots of areas are switching to titanium glue-ins which are expensive, but I wonder if this could enable more affordable option. A climber recently died in Greece after multiple bolts failed: https://gripped.com/news/rock-climber-dies-in-kalymnos-after...

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Good point, not only is titanium expensive but the glue-in part is tricky to get right as the glue has to completely surround the bolt. Not only that, but early efforts at titanium rebolting sometimes didn’t use glue at all. In Thailand, I pulled out some titanium bolts with my fingers because they weren’t glued in.

3 10mm bolts failing simultaneously after two decades (on direct it seems) is unexpected! If it were an installation problem, I can’t imagine it would take that long and that they’d all go at the same time. Ditto for corrosion… people take victory whips all the time.

All three bolts at critical level. A massive strain happens along. They pop: one, two, three!

It's not that unexpected.

It is absolutely unexpected in climbing. Even a single bolt failing is highly unusual.

Additionally, the rope length extends quite a bit of an anchor fails (and it partially recovers it’s elasticity before the other anchors engage). Later anchors would not get forces exceeding a normal ‘healthy’ bolts limits.

So there is some systemic failure involved in this scenario.

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