First, a couple of responses to Clevis: A) you are technically correct, and I therefore take back my previous claim, that some epoxies (including the ones we should use for route development) do bond to metal. However, the point that I was trying to make, and that I still stand by, is that epoxy does not bond to metal like it can to other surfaces. Metal like stainless steel is smooth, it only has microscopic pits in it. Therefore, there is very little for the glue to adhere ("bond") to. This is unlike rock, for example, where the glue actually seeps into the pores of the rock (much larger than the microscopic pits in steel), and therefore creates a substantially stronger bond. To be clear, I am not an engineer, but this is the information I collected this weekend from the person at Hilti customer service who specializes in their chemical anchoring systems, as well as a metallurgist. This makes sense. For example, remember all the metal route name tags in Muir that went missing? These were glued to the rock face, but because the glue couldn't substantially bond to the back of the tags people were able to pry them off with their fingers. Also, the fact that epoxy doesn't provide a substantial bond to metal is exactly why the UIAA requires "The embedded part of any rock anchor held in place by a chemical bonding agent shall have deformations or roughness, intended to prevent extraction or rotation (
http://www.theuiaa.org/upload_area/cert ... h_2009.pdf)." B) I agree with you that some set of standards, or generally agreed upon practices, for development would be nice to have. But there are several problems in the real world with this: who gets to have the authority to create them, how is disagreement handled, how are they enforced, and so on. The reality is that rock climbing is a dangerous activity, and anyone who climbs on anyone else's gear (draws, bolts, anchors, etc.) is putting their blind trust in someone else. In my opinion, the flip side of that coin is that those of who develop routes should do so to the best of our ability, always with a mind to maximizing safety. Not all developers agree with this, and that is why there are several routes that I personally choose not to climb because I do not like how it was developed (bolt placement/spacing, for example). Make your own choice, or develop your own routes. Oh, and the UIAA does have some standards set forth for rock anchors (see the link posted above).
Second, there are people actually testing commonly used anchors, and making subsequent decisions about which gear to use based on those results. Around here, Rick Weber and Jim Taylor have done much in this realm. As Kipp mentioned, this last weekend, I did some testing of my bolts (the Wave bolts). The quick results are that I could not get the bolts to fail. We had to stop the shear strength (load was perpendicular to bolt) tests at just over 9000lbs due to testing equipment limitations. The straight pullout strength (load was in-line with bolt) test stopped because at just over 8000lbs the rock exploded taking the bolt with it. Another interesting test was a straight pullout test with no glue, which showed that the bolt could hold just over 1000lbs before pulling out.
