Super 8 Knot - are the bunny ears actually redundant?

Hi, I'm Ryan Jinks and welcome to a How Knot To video. Knot With a K where we're going to show you how to tie one specific knot today and we're going to pull test it, not just a failure, but we're going to do a bunch of stuff. Down in the timeline below we're going to have timestamps to where you can skip to the part if you already know how to tie it to the part where we test it. Today we're going to tie the Super 8 or the Figure 8 with bunny ears and you're going to take a large bite of rope. This knot does require a little bit more rope depending on how big you want your bunny ears. Take this big bite, going to go around and instead of putting your bite through, which would create a Figure 8, you're going to take another bite of rope and take this bite, go over all of that and it's going to, as you can see, kind of girth hitch the other side of this. Now what's nice is if you leave it at the bottom where you have one, two, three strands and the rest of it's going to have two strands like a normal Figure 8 does. And I'm going to dress it, meaning all the strands are nice, beautiful and parallel. What's nice about this knot is I can pull down on this and then I can pull up on one of them. So if I have two uneven bolts, I can clip to that and I can manually equalize this. Once you load it, if one has more force than the other, it will kind of self-equalize until it cinches down and then it's kind of stuck. It doesn't self-equalize while you're using. Let me show you that one more time, but over my shoulder. And get a big old bite because I want some big bunny ears. I'm going to tie the Figure 8 itself and as I come around here, I'm going to stick this bite of rope through and then you take the end of it and you go over the whole knot like this. And then you're going to take that end and then we're going to dress it. I want everything to be parallel and ideally nothing crossing with these two strands. As you can see, these two strands here move when I pull that. That's going to stay at the bottom. And pull that, dress, dress, dress, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. And then now that I, I don't want to cinch that up too much, but now it looks good on pretty much both sides. Now these have a tendency to get twisted. Those are pretty good, which this will be in this case, my right anchor. And in a climbing scenario, I would clip it to my right bolt and my left bolt. And I would lock these. Someone's coming straight up the rock here. This would be correct, but if they're coming off to the side, I could just pull this bottom strand before it's all cinched down and I could just pull this backside and pull that backside and manually equalize this until it's in the direction that I want it to be. Now when they put some force on it, if this side is super loose, for example, I do that. In this case, super tight. When they go to weight it, it's going to put a lot more force on this thing. Now what we're going to find out is if a loose strand is a big problem, or if completely failed and your bolt, your cam, your placement comes out, in theory would still be attached to the eye, but if a rock cut this, will you still be redundant? Is this truly a anchor? For continuity, I have the Super 8 you just saw here and I put a Super 8 on this side as well. And we're going to find out if it breaks in here. But first we're going to pull it to 4.4 K in. We're going to watch the knots deform a little bit. They don't necessarily stay beautifully dressed. And then we'll try to untie it. Keep reading me. You mean stop? Yeah. So into 4.89 and you can see how it settles, which is also an interesting feature of just how ropes will act in general. We're already at 3.6. That's the live number. That's the peak force. Hydraulic would be settling, the soft shackles, and also the rope. There's a lot of textile settlement in that as well. At 4.8, or a little bit over a thousand pounds of force, these things are slightly deformed. You can see how this would ideally be over that, but you're pulling on only some of these strands and this isn't getting loaded. So that gets tied in there. These don't sound super hard. I bet you I could untie that. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That was super easy to untie. There we go. So I'm going to redress this. Okay. I've reset this. Let's pull it again. Pulling that strand here. Go stop. All right. So we got to 9.3 and it's already settling down to 7.5. So let's back it off. We can see here how much that's deformed because this back strand is, it's not being loaded the same. It's just shaped a little bit different. It's kept more of a form than some figure eights, normal figure eights. Sometimes it's nice to just like twist knots, even if you don't feel them moving. I think it relaxes it. Do you need more rope in order to get her? It doesn't relax me with you doing that next to me. Does that, does that help? I'm going to have a elbow snack. Okay. So I was able to untie it after 2000 pounds of force. Some knots are just seized after that much force. Oh shoot. Now I got to retie it. I'm having no luck on this one. Oh wow. This actually is really tight. If I get it, you're going to take credit for loosening it. Is that how knots work? This is a, by the way, how you compromise your final test. Oh damn. Did I just cut this off? Don't you reach for that knife. I've got this. Success. Just takes a hammer. Some of you might be thinking if I use this section of rope to tie the sample where we pulled to destruction that we have compromised the test. We'll find out if you're right. I retied both knots. I think it's either going to fail in here or on this side. So on this side, this went around, around this backside for the parallel two ropes. And then it went through the three strands and that's where it broke in that pinch point inside of there. And then it ends up looking like this. And how does this not look after being pulled? Looks snug. Looks the same as when we pulled it to eight, but looks harder. That is not coming undone. And this is very consistent with most of the tests we've done with this rope. And this Beals Millennium 10 millimeter rope is 25 kilonewtons MBS, which after you tie a knot in it of any sort, you're going to not get 25 kilonewtons. So this is what I'm really excited to see. I made a small eye to see if it does slip, what happens. And then I clipped just one eye on both sides. So now we can see if this is truly redundant. Yeah. So it broke in the knot. Like always, this went around the backside, like before, around here and through, got pinched. So it's broken here. It's broken here. It looks like neither eye slipped through and this is rock hard. Pretty much the same result. That's within, you know, standard deviation of the variations knots give. So something I'm really excited about is this Dyneema. And you're not supposed to tie knots in Dyneema. That's not what this is about. You're supposed to take this and splice it inside where it opens up like a Chinese finger trap and you can splice it. But it has the same coefficient as Teflon, aka it's slippery. And so if a knot slips, because we just saw that the two bunny ears that were not clipped did not get pulled through. So in theory that was redundant. What happens if they did slip through? I don't think these ropes that I'm testing are going to slip, but I think this will. You're not supposed to tie knots in Dyneema, but I'm going to do it here with even a short tail to see if the tail gets sucked in. I want to know the absolute limit of how a knot is in theory going to fail. So what's interesting is if let's say this does get pulled through, what happens if it gets pulled all the way through? You can see on the back side that this is playing with both of my bunny ears. But let's say I pull off one of those bunny ears and I am putting force here. It looks like it's just creating a wonky looking figure eight and it doesn't seem like that would fail. However, I re-salvaged my knot and this is the ear that was in there. If I was loading just this one and this one pulled through, in theory it would collapse. So I have my super eight here with only one eye clipped. And if this slips through, we'll have total failure. And this side is just figure eight because it'll hold. Oh, I love Dyneema. Is this also why you don't tie knots in it? Oh, oh no. Total failure. Oh, let's see if that stopper knot does anything. Nope. Nothing. And we're done. These are some good graphs. This is a good graph. So to pull that first knot through it was here and then here. I think the stopper knot was in here. This is not as that important because it's the type of rope is irrelevant for real life use. But I mean it took over a thousand pounds of force. 4.4 is a thousand pounds of force. Oh, that is very warm still. Wow, the amount of friction that took. It's so slippery that the whole thing will come undone. But albeit a very high force. Do I look smarter if I hold this? If you like to cuddle your abac, please let me know what we can add to make these tests more holistic and help teach knots better here at HowKnotTo. Please like and subscribe and let me know what else you want to see. Cheers.