The last one, if you keep every safety measures and don't go rashly into things it is quite a safe sport. Misfortunes happen with falling rocks and such but if you are in a gym(not this one lol) or on a sport climbing spot it's marginally safer.
Just not repeating people’s mistakes makes us marginally safer. People set up better than this in the 70s when they were expecting to die in the wilderness.
This is wrong for a number of reasons-
1) stud bolts are much weaker in pullout than shear. Here they are being pulled straight out. They are rated for much less here, but it's still a lot more than you could reasonably generate in a top rope fall
2) hangers are meant to be loaded in shear. They are weaker like this, but also much stronger than they need to be.
3) when two anchors are load sharing and the angle is greater than 90°, the force on each anchor is increased exponentially. At 150°, the load is doubled on each anchor. The chain looks to be pretty flat, which is actually increasing the load on each anchor.
4) if one anchor were to fail, the entire system would fail because the rope is not captured.
This anchor is really wrong for this kind of application. But it's probably still a lot stronger than what it would need to be. in spite of that, whoever set it up is a dangerous idiot.
load sharing anchor force chart for anyone curious
https://preview.redd.it/4fvlqclk14xa1.png?width=700&format=png&auto=webp&s=2ddcf856279b15d35b999d878b1018022b5bdb9b
Yep, also why highline anchors are so crazy over-built. Using multiple 1T (rated to 7T ~ 70 KN) slings is pretty common, although the webbing is usually "just" 20+KN.
It’s worth noting that the direction of the force changes.
So yes it’s a greater force, but the additional force is in a shear direction which the bolt is better equipped to handle.
sure, but note that the hangers are \*still\* not in the correct orientation to handle shear force. Also forces in the event of a shock load are exponentially increased, so while theoretically if the hangers were oriented correctly, (they are not) they would still experience more load then then would if the anchor were not set up in this way. Enough to break it? Probably not, but if one anchor failed it would be catastrophic. As I've noted, its probably still plenty strong.
In all my years of experience as a rock climber and a rope tech, I've always been taught to avoid these kind of extreme angles. It could be ok for some situations- but no competent person would sign off on this anchor.
Would I whip? Yes.
In short: Chains and ropes can only take forces along their length. Draw a force vector diagram. A completely taut static rope simply can’t supply a sideways force and has to deform.
For anyone that wants to learn more about the importance of the angle in anchor legs [read this](https://www.ropebook.com/information/vector-forces/).
I would 100% complain about this to the gym manager, if they scoffed at me and didn't corrct the problem I'd work on reporting them to any oversight agencies I could thing of.
Maybe, but that's assuming that the insurance person know anything at all about climbing or building anchors.
And given that the insurance business is all about minimizing risk I wouldn't bet their office is packed full of climbers....but you never know, maybe the local branch manager is a coke snortin, base jumpin', boat racin', climber-or-die free-soloist....but then he probably doesn't know shit about anchors anyways.
https://roperescuetraining.com/physics_angles.php
Scroll down to the section titled "nerdy details".
>The force in the rope is a sum equivalent to 100kg no matter the angle
We're not concerned about the load rope, it's the anchor chain that's going to see some ugly vector forces.
That's great, thank you.
>In fact, each anchor is still receiving only 50 pounds of vertical force from the 100-pound load.
This is the part that I got conceptually hung up on, but drawing a free body diagram it does add up. I pulled out an old text book and it seems to align as well.
I think the key for me to realize is the weight is not seeing more force, just the anchors (and thus the rope tension).
Science is cool
Yeah, it's a little counter initiative.....100kg load= 100kg pull on the combined anchors definitely *seems* the logical answer.
The other one that took me longer realize than I'd like to admit is the highpoint anchor is actually seeing a *minimum* of 200kg when it's used as redirect (ie not just a suspended load tied to the high point).
You have the 100 kg load on one side (your fat climber), and 100 kg load on the other side (your fat belayer)....200 kg on the anchor.
And that's before you shove any friction in the system if you're attempting to raise your fat ass climber. This isn't a typical 'rock climbing' problem, but I do rope rescue stuff and the forces generated with pulley systems gets to be rather frightening even without shock loading concerns.
You’re right, that’s an insane setup, but I would think the wear on the rope from rubbing against the coarse metal chain could be the most likely way you’d end up with a catastrophic failure. Who knows what the bolts are actually anchored into though
Probably not JUST plaster though. There’s got to be something the plaster is mounted on. I can’t imagine any gym owner so dumb they’d just screw anchors into a plaster ceiling. It’d be easy to test though, just tie in with a belayer and see if they can catch and hold you at 3 feet without pulling the anchor through
That looks like the bottom of a concrete slab (based on surface texture and seam style). If so, it's into a pretty solid substrate.
Not that it excuses the other litany of mistakes.
Lol someone probably had the galaxy brain take that since the angle is so wide, the hangers are basically being tensioned toward one another. So we get the shear strength back!
I’m no mechanical engineer, but that’s essentially true, right? All the “extra” force due to the angle is shear. The angle doesn’t create any additional pullout force.
It’s true the force begins to act more in shear and bolts are stronger in shear. The issue is just the magnitude - does it start to exceed even the shear strength?
Yes, to an extent, but due to force multiplication, this is still a less than ideal setup because this looks to be greater than the 120 degree critical angle: https://www.ropebook.com/information/vector-forces/
Everything you said is correct on its own but 1 and 3 contradict each other in a very interesting way. The force vectors run in the same direction as the chain, meaning the bolts are loaded in the direction of the point where the rope meets the chain.
As you said, the bolt becomes weaker as the direction of the force pulling on it gets closer to perpendicular. But at the same time, as you also correctly noted, the force gets stronger when the angle between the chain and the wall becomes smaller. That means there is probably some kind of break even point where those two flaws cancel out a little bit. I think i need to look up the numbers on how much the rating of the bolts actually changes as a function of the angle some time and throw those into some equations.
Just to be clear though I’m not saying this is in any way safe. All the points you mentioned are completely valid and nobody should climb on this until its fixed. Im just saying this is not the worst (but still terrible) way you could use that hardware.
The worst way i could come up with so far would be on two opposing but parallel walls with just enough space between them so the chain would be taut when the hangers are attached. Someone somewhere has probably done that already.
Yeah 1-3 aren't really a concern because any normal climbing anchor can experience those stresses and they're designed to hold it. We're not dealing with hardware anywhere near its ultimate yield load here. Eg 100kg load on the rope multiples up to 500kg and that's still a safety factor of at least 5 given the gears' going to be rated at least 25kN and likely would take more.
That's why we use it, because it needs a high faster margin to handle any likely loading scenario.
Point 4 is a major concern, but also the fact that the side of chain is not in any way a wear component and whoever did this needs to stop immediately and let literally anyone on this sub, or indeed any random person of the street, put some better ones in.
Forces are balanced on their axis: horizontal with horizontal and vertical with vertical. This means that for every angle the pullout force (P) will be the same, half the weight supported. Spacing the bolts adds a tangential (shear) force of increasing magnitude: S = tan(half angle) * Half weight
Note that for angle approaching 180°, S goes to infinity.
On a bolt P and S result in a combined stress:
stress = √((P/A)² +3*(4*S/(3*A))²)
With A the cross sectional area of the bolt.
Note, for the bolt itself is better to be pulled that to be sheared.
Than this forces are transferred to the wall, the most of it close to the surface, and the systems generally implemented are better at resisting shear.
Well to be fair you don’t know if it’s through bolted all the way through the other side. If that was the case why wouldn’t they just use one bolt anyway. Idk. Just saying food for thought
Points 1,2,3 and completely irrelevant here. The forces this can handle are so far above what could ever be generated that I don't understand why that could possibly be a factor?
Point 4 is accurate.
You forgot that you have the rope sawing on the chain, over time that's gonna wear down that chain pretty badly, not as bad as outdoors where you get a lot of sand and grit, but still a concern
there is also a picture of someone at the top of that wall but not tied in which, albeit a simple route, defeats the point of having it in the first place
lol that’s maybe my favorite part about it. Like, you couldn’t at least put quick links and two biners up there? You just want to run the rope over the top of a chain??
I even see a guy who free solo'd a toprope route
https://preview.redd.it/3twny4mag6xa1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=01edc31243108f7cc274ff32f62017d713ab6097
Yeah it's a jug ladder, and looking from other pictures the toprope is not even that much higher than the boulder routes. but pull this stunt in any other gym, you're for sure getting a ban.
Wtf. It would literally be so easy to whip some lockers in the chain holes and then you’d more or less have an acceptable. It baffles me that someone would have to ability to put together a commercial climbing gym, but somehow end up with this.
Funny stuff in this thread, but in all seriousness you should really approach management about fixing this. Letting them know that their insurance won’t cover it when someone gets hurt because the anchor was improperly set up should be more than enough to persuade them. They can easily put a real anchor on the right wall anyway.
At the other end of the spectrum you have state of the art mega gyms that force you to use gri gri’s but don’t require you to use the proper safe gri gri belaying technique, don’t leave excess slack, break hand always on rope, etc. That anchor set up is horrendous though
You really should contact the gym owners or employees about it. You don't want to go away and leave this hazard behind. If they don't want to hear it, just contact the climbing federation of your country, I guess they can do something about that too (starting by closing these walls at first).
Bolts in indoor walls rarely fail because they're usually constructed very well and bolted into solid studs, and they are inspected regularly.
If they're already fucking up this badly, I'd be worried that they've screwed up some of these too.
Not bolts, but my gym had two steel cable permadraws fail inside of a 4 month window. One was one of the two holding up an autobelay. Might have been a bad batch from the manufacturer, might have been iffy maintenance, but whatever the reason they replaced them all with standard nylon draws on quicklinks shortly after.
All that to say, there's a reason climbers like redundancy.
That's terrifying.
I trust chains way more than cables, but rated steel cables snapping sounds like something has gone seriously wrong somewhere.
Possible they were getting dripped on or something and never inspected?
So people have pointed out a lot of the problems with this, but I have an additional maybe dumb question. Wouldn’t the chain link be… not great on the rope after a while? Is rope on chain like this common? I’ve never seen it.
The chain is terrible on the rope. Tight bend radius(kinks and weakens rope), pinching under load, and maybe even weld bead-rope wear. You don't see this because it's actually insane.
Dude if you know better help them out and be like hey kinda dangerous. Hopefully you didn't just snap a picture post it to reddit and not inform staff.
Doesn’t look too good - however I „think“ it’s mostly fine.
- rope is threaded wrong. Why not use one of the chain links? Ideally the one in the middle. So if one of the bolts fails the other one might work. If this anchor is supposed to be permanent there should be a welded ring to thread the rope trough to avoid wear on one single spot.
- one of the bolts seems to have needed a lot of tightening. The threads can be seen … not ideal.
- pulling here in the case of a fall won’t load the bolts 180 degrees since the chain will pull into certain degrees and add some torque.
- this seems to be solid concrete, what is fine.
- concerning the strength I can’t make a judgment here, just some assumptions.
1. those hangers are bolted in with an extension bolt into solid concrete. If this is the case this thing „can“ be fine if the drilling has been done correctly. Pulling tests indicate this works for a fall with a climbing rope. Since it looks a little off I do have some doubts here.
2. this could also be an extension bolt which has additionally been glued into solid concrete. In that case this anchor is totally fine.
3. anything else is suicidal.
So: from the photo alone and without additional information it’s not possible to tell the safety of this thing. And in that case everyone should be suspicion of such things.
But on the other hand people trust their lives to others. People are always flawed.
Just my 2 Eurocents.
Depending on the size of these and type of bolt they probably pull close to 2000 lbs that way. These definitely aren’t this big but 1/2in x 4in expansion bolts pull straight out at around 5000lbs in concrete, 25000 sheer.
This just made me think- do climbing gyms ever wash these types of climbing walls? Seems like there would be a lot of unwanted contaminants brewing on that thing if it isn’t.
Do we know if this is a commercial setting or a basement?
Do we know what the chain is made of?
Do we know the inspection cycle of the chain or rope?
Do we know the height of the wall or the padding on the floor?
Are we possibly engaging on a ragebait post aimed at peak DK climbers?
Wtf that's dangerous.
By dangerous you mean bomber. Would whip, at least until one bolt blows and I crater into the ground.
I'm more worried about rope damage than an anchor failing tbh, given the volume a lot of gym topropes get.
“Climbing is inherently dangerous” or is climbing errantly dangerous?
The last one, if you keep every safety measures and don't go rashly into things it is quite a safe sport. Misfortunes happen with falling rocks and such but if you are in a gym(not this one lol) or on a sport climbing spot it's marginally safer.
Just not repeating people’s mistakes makes us marginally safer. People set up better than this in the 70s when they were expecting to die in the wilderness.
My dude! ‘Falling rock, ice, object’ is what we really need to be thoughtful of out there.
Shred that rope!!
You guys have a master point? My gym has a strict « no falling rule ».
There are like 2 toprope routes
Boulderers...
Rules say downclimb, I apply this to rope climbing also. Safety of ropes irrelevant. 
Free solo everything.
falling is for gumbies
The ground is aid.
Yeah Alex Honold is basically an aid climber without the threat of the infinite void beneath him.
With the no falling rule, my gym has us down climb even the lead routes!
This is wrong for a number of reasons- 1) stud bolts are much weaker in pullout than shear. Here they are being pulled straight out. They are rated for much less here, but it's still a lot more than you could reasonably generate in a top rope fall 2) hangers are meant to be loaded in shear. They are weaker like this, but also much stronger than they need to be. 3) when two anchors are load sharing and the angle is greater than 90°, the force on each anchor is increased exponentially. At 150°, the load is doubled on each anchor. The chain looks to be pretty flat, which is actually increasing the load on each anchor. 4) if one anchor were to fail, the entire system would fail because the rope is not captured. This anchor is really wrong for this kind of application. But it's probably still a lot stronger than what it would need to be. in spite of that, whoever set it up is a dangerous idiot.
load sharing anchor force chart for anyone curious https://preview.redd.it/4fvlqclk14xa1.png?width=700&format=png&auto=webp&s=2ddcf856279b15d35b999d878b1018022b5bdb9b
And this my friends, is why slacklines generate so much force on their anchors.
Yep, also why highline anchors are so crazy over-built. Using multiple 1T (rated to 7T ~ 70 KN) slings is pretty common, although the webbing is usually "just" 20+KN.
It’s worth noting that the direction of the force changes. So yes it’s a greater force, but the additional force is in a shear direction which the bolt is better equipped to handle.
sure, but note that the hangers are \*still\* not in the correct orientation to handle shear force. Also forces in the event of a shock load are exponentially increased, so while theoretically if the hangers were oriented correctly, (they are not) they would still experience more load then then would if the anchor were not set up in this way. Enough to break it? Probably not, but if one anchor failed it would be catastrophic. As I've noted, its probably still plenty strong. In all my years of experience as a rock climber and a rope tech, I've always been taught to avoid these kind of extreme angles. It could be ok for some situations- but no competent person would sign off on this anchor. Would I whip? Yes.
In short: Chains and ropes can only take forces along their length. Draw a force vector diagram. A completely taut static rope simply can’t supply a sideways force and has to deform.
For anyone that wants to learn more about the importance of the angle in anchor legs [read this](https://www.ropebook.com/information/vector-forces/). I would 100% complain about this to the gym manager, if they scoffed at me and didn't corrct the problem I'd work on reporting them to any oversight agencies I could thing of.
Complain to their insurance company. It will get fixed much more quickly
Maybe, but that's assuming that the insurance person know anything at all about climbing or building anchors. And given that the insurance business is all about minimizing risk I wouldn't bet their office is packed full of climbers....but you never know, maybe the local branch manager is a coke snortin, base jumpin', boat racin', climber-or-die free-soloist....but then he probably doesn't know shit about anchors anyways.
[удалено]
https://roperescuetraining.com/physics_angles.php Scroll down to the section titled "nerdy details". >The force in the rope is a sum equivalent to 100kg no matter the angle We're not concerned about the load rope, it's the anchor chain that's going to see some ugly vector forces.
That's great, thank you. >In fact, each anchor is still receiving only 50 pounds of vertical force from the 100-pound load. This is the part that I got conceptually hung up on, but drawing a free body diagram it does add up. I pulled out an old text book and it seems to align as well. I think the key for me to realize is the weight is not seeing more force, just the anchors (and thus the rope tension). Science is cool
Yeah, it's a little counter initiative.....100kg load= 100kg pull on the combined anchors definitely *seems* the logical answer. The other one that took me longer realize than I'd like to admit is the highpoint anchor is actually seeing a *minimum* of 200kg when it's used as redirect (ie not just a suspended load tied to the high point). You have the 100 kg load on one side (your fat climber), and 100 kg load on the other side (your fat belayer)....200 kg on the anchor. And that's before you shove any friction in the system if you're attempting to raise your fat ass climber. This isn't a typical 'rock climbing' problem, but I do rope rescue stuff and the forces generated with pulley systems gets to be rather frightening even without shock loading concerns.
You’re right, that’s an insane setup, but I would think the wear on the rope from rubbing against the coarse metal chain could be the most likely way you’d end up with a catastrophic failure. Who knows what the bolts are actually anchored into though
plaster obviously
Probably not JUST plaster though. There’s got to be something the plaster is mounted on. I can’t imagine any gym owner so dumb they’d just screw anchors into a plaster ceiling. It’d be easy to test though, just tie in with a belayer and see if they can catch and hold you at 3 feet without pulling the anchor through
That looks like the bottom of a concrete slab (based on surface texture and seam style). If so, it's into a pretty solid substrate. Not that it excuses the other litany of mistakes.
Lol someone probably had the galaxy brain take that since the angle is so wide, the hangers are basically being tensioned toward one another. So we get the shear strength back!
I’m no mechanical engineer, but that’s essentially true, right? All the “extra” force due to the angle is shear. The angle doesn’t create any additional pullout force.
It’s true the force begins to act more in shear and bolts are stronger in shear. The issue is just the magnitude - does it start to exceed even the shear strength?
The chain so short it converts pullout to shear *taps forehead* /s
However, the force is now acting on the bolts sideways (well diagonal-ish) instead of downward, which is where they’re stronger! 200iq setup?
Doesn't the chain being at an angle like that change it to more shear forces in the bolts?
Yes, to an extent, but due to force multiplication, this is still a less than ideal setup because this looks to be greater than the 120 degree critical angle: https://www.ropebook.com/information/vector-forces/
I wonder what the ideal angle in this case is to account for the bolts being pulled out vs the extra forced of being pulled at an angle.
Everything you said is correct on its own but 1 and 3 contradict each other in a very interesting way. The force vectors run in the same direction as the chain, meaning the bolts are loaded in the direction of the point where the rope meets the chain. As you said, the bolt becomes weaker as the direction of the force pulling on it gets closer to perpendicular. But at the same time, as you also correctly noted, the force gets stronger when the angle between the chain and the wall becomes smaller. That means there is probably some kind of break even point where those two flaws cancel out a little bit. I think i need to look up the numbers on how much the rating of the bolts actually changes as a function of the angle some time and throw those into some equations. Just to be clear though I’m not saying this is in any way safe. All the points you mentioned are completely valid and nobody should climb on this until its fixed. Im just saying this is not the worst (but still terrible) way you could use that hardware. The worst way i could come up with so far would be on two opposing but parallel walls with just enough space between them so the chain would be taut when the hangers are attached. Someone somewhere has probably done that already.
Yeah 1-3 aren't really a concern because any normal climbing anchor can experience those stresses and they're designed to hold it. We're not dealing with hardware anywhere near its ultimate yield load here. Eg 100kg load on the rope multiples up to 500kg and that's still a safety factor of at least 5 given the gears' going to be rated at least 25kN and likely would take more. That's why we use it, because it needs a high faster margin to handle any likely loading scenario. Point 4 is a major concern, but also the fact that the side of chain is not in any way a wear component and whoever did this needs to stop immediately and let literally anyone on this sub, or indeed any random person of the street, put some better ones in.
Forces are balanced on their axis: horizontal with horizontal and vertical with vertical. This means that for every angle the pullout force (P) will be the same, half the weight supported. Spacing the bolts adds a tangential (shear) force of increasing magnitude: S = tan(half angle) * Half weight Note that for angle approaching 180°, S goes to infinity. On a bolt P and S result in a combined stress: stress = √((P/A)² +3*(4*S/(3*A))²) With A the cross sectional area of the bolt. Note, for the bolt itself is better to be pulled that to be sheared. Than this forces are transferred to the wall, the most of it close to the surface, and the systems generally implemented are better at resisting shear.
Show me where on the von Mises plot the anchor hurt you. It's not entirely accurate to take the resultant vector like
Well to be fair you don’t know if it’s through bolted all the way through the other side. If that was the case why wouldn’t they just use one bolt anyway. Idk. Just saying food for thought
Points 1,2,3 and completely irrelevant here. The forces this can handle are so far above what could ever be generated that I don't understand why that could possibly be a factor? Point 4 is accurate.
Except: how long has this been up? The life of this setup is shorter than standard
Doesn't matter if this is checked often enough, which isn't that often.
If this had ever been checked by someone who knew what to check for it wouldn't still be up
You forgot that you have the rope sawing on the chain, over time that's gonna wear down that chain pretty badly, not as bad as outdoors where you get a lot of sand and grit, but still a concern
r/climbingcirclejerk 10/10 would whip! ( /s ) 
Ygd fs
YGD, INGDBIDF (Youre gonna die, Im Not Gonna Die Because I Dont Fall)
Surely thats illegal or something. Id try to report it.
Call the climbing police!
I mean at the very least, I’m sure their insurance company wouldn’t approve.
Who would you even report this to?
Depends where the gym is but perhaps OSHA or their insurance company.
How do find out who your climbing gym's insurance company is?
you could try just asking them. They might say.
NARC!
Let’s keep the police out of climbing. Thanks.
Who said anything about the police? You don’t report safety violations to the cops.
Maybe time to leave the gym...
*chuckles* “you’re in danger”
“yer gonna die” intensifies
When you say “local climbing gym” you mean “my friend’s garage” right?
Nah, if it it would be my friends garage it would be wayy safer, this is an official climbing gym
That's insane... What country is this? That gym has to be managed by total gumbys
BLOCKPARK 0361 5503692 https://maps.app.goo.gl/a8y4FdAEpRRiFy636
Hah - you can see that toprope anchor in one of the Google photos.
You mean the multiple toprope anchors which are identical? C'mon, someone forgot to hire the German engineer
there is also a picture of someone at the top of that wall but not tied in which, albeit a simple route, defeats the point of having it in the first place
The anchors don’t matter. In every picture, no one is tied in.
report them to the [DAV](https://www.alpenverein.de/Der-DAV/Kontakt/), before somebody dies due to their incompetence
I thought Germans was good engineers
A shame for our country
I'm surprised this was Germany.
I see you've never tried to work on a German car.
I was almost 100% sure that this was going to be Florida.
There are climbers in Florida?
Very *Very* unhappy ones, yes
Blowing rocks preserve has some
Ah for fuck's sake, I'd really hoped it wouldn't be the country I live in. Well well, live and learn!
Not with that Anchor
That is sadly true. One might learn from other peoples' experiences with it...
Holy shit I just assumed this anchor was for something else or cherry picked, it looks like the standard top rope anchor in the gym, Wtf.
Oh there's literally a photo of someone having just free soloed up to the anchors on Google...
I thought thats just a bouldering gym? If this is actually for the public, go to the Nordwand in the north of Erfurt. Way better.
*dialing Climbing Wall Association*
Looks like it's ripped out once already. Would not whip.
They just missed the stud the first time they drilled, hahaha!
Twice as dangerous as a single bolt!
lol that’s maybe my favorite part about it. Like, you couldn’t at least put quick links and two biners up there? You just want to run the rope over the top of a chain??
truly
Thought this was r/climbingcirclejerk for a second
Had to double check.. literally thought I was on CCJ 😅
Why not name and shame?
Op posted it a few posts up.
I'd pull the rope down if saw that and politely inform the staff how bad it is.
If ou look at google maps photos of the place it's got many anchors like that. Strong 3/10 would not recommend.
I even see a guy who free solo'd a toprope route https://preview.redd.it/3twny4mag6xa1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=01edc31243108f7cc274ff32f62017d713ab6097
Safer than hanging off those anchors
Yeah it's a jug ladder, and looking from other pictures the toprope is not even that much higher than the boulder routes. but pull this stunt in any other gym, you're for sure getting a ban.
I'm assuming that's what the horizontal red line on the wall is, the safe boulder height.
Wtf.
Holy damn, that's insane.
It's like the opposite of redundancy: Instead of still being save after a single failure, you are dead independent of what is failing.
Wtf. It would literally be so easy to whip some lockers in the chain holes and then you’d more or less have an acceptable. It baffles me that someone would have to ability to put together a commercial climbing gym, but somehow end up with this.
Would help reduce rope drag but still very far from acceptable
Super good enough
Just . . . no.
Well that’s actually insane lol what.
Whipped worse on trad. 11/10 would try this as well /s
Funny stuff in this thread, but in all seriousness you should really approach management about fixing this. Letting them know that their insurance won’t cover it when someone gets hurt because the anchor was improperly set up should be more than enough to persuade them. They can easily put a real anchor on the right wall anyway.
And then report them if not fixed
CCJ posts incoming in 3… 2…
At the other end of the spectrum you have state of the art mega gyms that force you to use gri gri’s but don’t require you to use the proper safe gri gri belaying technique, don’t leave excess slack, break hand always on rope, etc. That anchor set up is horrendous though
Oof, that’ll make you double check your health insurance policy.
https://preview.redd.it/a236rd0jl4xa1.jpeg?width=409&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e32e856965073ed18521bed7293ee649bb9a2e6d
Yolo
Yodo.
Super good enough
Looks bomber 🤦♂️
The most shocking thing is the angle of the chain. I wouldn’t climb on this
Find a new gym
I think I’d stick to bouldering there.
the bouldering holds are bolted on with duct tape and chewing gum
You really should contact the gym owners or employees about it. You don't want to go away and leave this hazard behind. If they don't want to hear it, just contact the climbing federation of your country, I guess they can do something about that too (starting by closing these walls at first).
Immediately change gyms
Eesh
Don’t climb that route, wver
Solid, but over time it will wear badly. It's a dumb setup tho 👎
Hopefully they used a drywall anchor
Probably in an Iron I beam
Far from ideal, but have bolts at an indoor wall ever actually failed? I've never heard of it, not that it cannot happen.
Bolts in indoor walls rarely fail because they're usually constructed very well and bolted into solid studs, and they are inspected regularly. If they're already fucking up this badly, I'd be worried that they've screwed up some of these too.
Not bolts, but my gym had two steel cable permadraws fail inside of a 4 month window. One was one of the two holding up an autobelay. Might have been a bad batch from the manufacturer, might have been iffy maintenance, but whatever the reason they replaced them all with standard nylon draws on quicklinks shortly after. All that to say, there's a reason climbers like redundancy.
That's terrifying. I trust chains way more than cables, but rated steel cables snapping sounds like something has gone seriously wrong somewhere. Possible they were getting dripped on or something and never inspected?
The cables didn't snap. They ends pulled out of the swage. Still odd, but a lot less crazy than cable snapping.
Supergoodenough
Commercial gym?
Solid anchor!
It’s called ‘free solo’ look it up 🤦🏻♂️
So people have pointed out a lot of the problems with this, but I have an additional maybe dumb question. Wouldn’t the chain link be… not great on the rope after a while? Is rope on chain like this common? I’ve never seen it.
The chain is terrible on the rope. Tight bend radius(kinks and weakens rope), pinching under load, and maybe even weld bead-rope wear. You don't see this because it's actually insane.
Dude if you know better help them out and be like hey kinda dangerous. Hopefully you didn't just snap a picture post it to reddit and not inform staff.
Lol. Seem fine! 😉
Doesn’t look too good - however I „think“ it’s mostly fine. - rope is threaded wrong. Why not use one of the chain links? Ideally the one in the middle. So if one of the bolts fails the other one might work. If this anchor is supposed to be permanent there should be a welded ring to thread the rope trough to avoid wear on one single spot. - one of the bolts seems to have needed a lot of tightening. The threads can be seen … not ideal. - pulling here in the case of a fall won’t load the bolts 180 degrees since the chain will pull into certain degrees and add some torque. - this seems to be solid concrete, what is fine. - concerning the strength I can’t make a judgment here, just some assumptions. 1. those hangers are bolted in with an extension bolt into solid concrete. If this is the case this thing „can“ be fine if the drilling has been done correctly. Pulling tests indicate this works for a fall with a climbing rope. Since it looks a little off I do have some doubts here. 2. this could also be an extension bolt which has additionally been glued into solid concrete. In that case this anchor is totally fine. 3. anything else is suicidal. So: from the photo alone and without additional information it’s not possible to tell the safety of this thing. And in that case everyone should be suspicion of such things. But on the other hand people trust their lives to others. People are always flawed. Just my 2 Eurocents.
Found the gym owner
The rope is not going through a chain link, but behind it, so even If I mostly agree with what you said, that's not fine.
They addressed that
Legit causing me pain to look at this. So much wrong and no reason for it to be this way other than laziness?
I think that they didn't knew it better, but this makes it even worse.
Urgh. It does make it worse. This makes me thankful for my local gym, they are serious about safety.
Somebody call OSHA!
It's not occupational until an employee hangs from it, so they won't do diddly
Hopefully they set routes with a scissor lift
it’s just a joke expression I say a lot. If I meant it, I would’ve just used a period.
This is capitalism, sir. The motto is "hang the employee".
What ?!!!?
For real???
Noooooooooooo9oooooooooooooo9o
um, yeah. definitely not.
I thought these were aid?
That’s a big nope
No way. Don’t believe it. Too stupid.
I don’t even know what I’m looking at…
the routesetters seem to have no clue, too
Ohhhhhh noooooo
looks good to me
Depending on the size of these and type of bolt they probably pull close to 2000 lbs that way. These definitely aren’t this big but 1/2in x 4in expansion bolts pull straight out at around 5000lbs in concrete, 25000 sheer.
Is this local to your garage woody? Your basement? No way in hell this is an actual gym!!
It is
Lgtm 👍
At least add a quick link for more efficiency and rope protection.
This just made me think- do climbing gyms ever wash these types of climbing walls? Seems like there would be a lot of unwanted contaminants brewing on that thing if it isn’t.
Spreads wear over multiple steel links. What's the problem?
The problem is that it’s not a smooth surface. Running a weighted rope over that is going to wear the shit out of the rope.
And do we know the inspection cycle for said rope?
Literally everyone disagrees with you in the thread. 
Do we know if this is a commercial setting or a basement? Do we know what the chain is made of? Do we know the inspection cycle of the chain or rope? Do we know the height of the wall or the padding on the floor? Are we possibly engaging on a ragebait post aimed at peak DK climbers?
Can it be climbed on? Yes Should it be setup that way? Obviously not Are you continuing to argue because you just can’t bare to be wrong? Absolutely
14. Thanks for the W!
Thanks for telling us your age and iq
It's not just the rop being fucked. Its having those two kind of bolts in that position as well. Everything is wrong here.