Monkey fists don't work, or get stuck if they do

The thing about knots is they don't really have a lot of range. Two, one. I've placed the biggest monkey fist we have and I've never actually had a placement where I was like, oh for sure that's an amazing placement. It's a monkey foot, right? Because like a foot would look like that, right? I would say it's very similar to ice climbing. Sort of like a leader must not fall. We had an injury. I don't think Ryan's going to be very happy. My name is Jenny, also known as Jenny Lemon Pie on Instagram. Metal protection, metal lead protection is not allowed on the sandstone in the Czech Republic. It's actually written into the rules that govern their climbing areas. And so the way that they protect classical or traditional routes is with bits of cord, webbing, old climbing rope that are tied into a variety of different kinds of knots. Anytime we leave the ground, we take a variety of knots with us. They can be simple overhands, double overhands, figure eights, and sort of the knot that gets like the most attention or like the most reaction out of people when they see it is the monkey fist. I actually don't place them very often because the thing about knots is they don't really have a lot of range. It's kind of like if you were to climb routes with only knots or like only with knots and hexes. So you're always looking for passive placements. And with the monkey fist, like you're just looking for a bigger passive placement. I'm going to say it's rare. I haven't run into it as often on the routes that I've climbed. Placing things that you would definitely whip on isn't really, I wouldn't really say that's how you approach most of the routes that you might climb in the Czech Republic. It's really more of like a, I would say it's very similar to ice climbing, sort of like a leader must not fall mentality because you're placing a lot of gear that like theoretically is good gear, but there's so many nuanced factors that go into whether or not that gear is going to hold. You know, it's like you have no idea how much a knot might deform under impact force. You have no idea how much friction might play a role in whether or not that knot is going to hold. You're placing pro based on a theory. I tend to gravitate actually towards the smaller placements. Our smaller knots, it's easier to get that knot to a more compact state where like the knot itself is actually like really solid and hard and like approaching the hardness of something that won't squish down any further to come out of a placement. But the other part of my thinking is that friction also does play a role. Like the sandstone in Czech has an incredible amount of friction to it. You know, I don't think that it's necessarily what's going to hold your placement or not, but it's a number that goes into the equation just like anything else. And so in that respect, I think, okay, well a bigger knot is going to have more surface area contact with the rock and therefore more friction. But like all of this in my brain when I'm on lead and I'm choosing placements is completely untested. Stopper knot versus buster. That no longer looks the same. Figure eight knot factor two fall. Oh, it wasn't a full amputation, just a partial amputation. Do you think Amazon will return this? What's your analysis of Decker? Following the accident, we didn't get him to the operating room soon enough. And unfortunately the arm was detached for so long that it was no longer viable. So we had to close him up like this. There wasn't enough adjacent tissue to do a flap. So we went ahead and went with the duct tape allograft. So 4.46 is the MBS of Decker's arm. Okay. So right now our two weights is 0.8 kilonewtons and we're going to lift this up and then we're going to rip out our passive pro. 8.18 kilonewtons. Outside of the knot extra. It just got all screwed. Yeah. What'd you think of it? That's pretty impressive. I thought it would fail way below that. Guess the kilonewtons, Gus. 1.91. Oh, the knot changed shape. It's a stopper knot, not just an overhand and it's just chewed up really bad right there. Hatline scale three. I'm glad it's in the case. 3.84. You placed it well. It clearly had to do a lot to come out, but it didn't break the cordage. We got a higher force on our six mil. This broke. This actually failed. It didn't slip out. I'm curious if that webbing is going to do better. Yeah. The surface area, the strength. You don't need the strength in the material. If it's not going to stay. Oh, that didn't even stand a chance. That's still a pretty good number. It's just these flat overhands. There's a lot more flat now. It's hard to keep a three-dimensional shape. I found that on our last video. Oh God. And it bounces. That's my favorite part. Where is it? It's still in there. It actually broke the webbing. I'd whip. Would you whip Larry? Sure. Whatever whip means. It means fall from heights. Oh no, thank you. Oh, son of a. I haven't seen anyone whip on a knot personally either. I've seen people take whips and check. Usually it's at the ring. A lot of routes, scary as they might be, were protected at the true technical crux or the most insecure part of the route. And also too, those are the routes that get climbed. There's a lot of super dangerous routes in Czech that don't have pro at the crux. If it is truly super dangerous, they don't get climbed or they only get climbed by people who are super strong that know for sure that they can do those moves and they're not going to take a fall there. I've seen people fall, but not on knots, mostly on rings. You don't approach climbing there that way. I know climbers who have had a route on their mind for months or years and they haven't gotten to do it yet because they don't feel like they're ready. It's not projecting the way that you can project things in other places where you can place cam or where there's, especially in the towers, you can't preview the route. You can't set up a top rope. In a lot of the areas, top roping isn't even allowed because it erodes the top of the formations and the tops of the routes. They talk about the sandstone being soft all the time, which I think is a little bit misleading. A lot of the rock there is not soft at all. It's actually really, really hard, but it does have a really high erosion rate because it's made up of a large grain of sediment. So given the surface friction of the rock plus the large grain sediment, anything like running over the rock very quickly erodes that surface. I don't recommend intentionally leading on knots on other types of rock. For certain, do not recommend it for glaciated granite. I do think that friction plays a really big role in whether or not this pro is going to work in the ideal case scenario. I don't recommend it in the desert, in the U.S. desert. I think that the sandstone in the desert is way too fine of a grain. The cracks are too straight sided. We have a figure eight in our cam crusher, and our cam crusher is tapered quite a bit. Oh, it's holding, sort of. I mean, that was a figure eight. Oh, it's actually holding. Man, I gotta stop saying those words. Every time I say those words, it did, but it was, they separated. At the end of the day, this is, this is 10 mil and it's squeezing all the way through, right? So, oh, that's an interesting graph. All right, so we'll do a stopper knot with, I guess, three wraps. Keep going a little. Keep going a little. Keep going a little. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. Make it happen. Ha ha ha, that's just sick. It's not even worth finding out how many kilograms that is, or moving. It was untying itself, which is fascinating, and that's fascinating how warm that is. I mean, how it breaks is more interesting to me than the number. It's, uh, flattening out enough to get through that crack. That sounded like five. Oh, that's, that's interesting. I think that's what dogecoin looks like. Okay, we did a water knot and made this, uh, crack really small over here, so that's our taper. Let's see what happens. Go for it. So, it broke here in our water knot. Look at, like, the kind of constriction that you need in order to get that to stick. Just shredding the ---- out of it, and this is just the same knot Steve keeps insisting on using. That's the first, that's the first one. That was the figure eight. This, this is now rock hard. Broke where? Here? Oh, no, it came, it came out. It didn't pull through. No! Out of this little crack? There's a couple different ways to tie a monkey fist. Essentially, you, you want to create, um, this, like, round structure that the knot can go around, and so you can use, like, a chunk of wood or a piece of rock and then build your monkey fist around it so there's, like, a hard core in the monkey fist, which is going to give it a lot of volume and also a lot of sturdiness. Um, number two is you tie a knot out of some sort of cord or robe, or you make a small monkey fist, and then you build a larger monkey fist around the knot or the smaller monkey fist that you put inside. Our, um, our golf ball size monkey fist is constructed this way, and it actually has, like, a really perfect shape to it, and it feels really super solid. Um, and then the third way, which our largest monkey fist is made, is essentially with nothing inside it. It's just a tied monkey fist, and it, you can totally flatten it out, and it just becomes kind of this, like, big, squishy, flattish ball. The first way of doing it with the rock inside is technically not legal in Czech or Saxony. Um, the rules state that the, the protection piece, whatever's used for protection, needs to be made out of textile only, so putting a rock inside of a textile breaks the textile only rule, and, um, yeah, technically not street legal. Three, two, one. It's still up there, imagine that. Okay, you're gonna have to send me up the other monkey fist. Oh, I was gonna show you how to tie these things, but I'm not proud of what I'm able to do. Three. Bobby, guess the force. 1.4. The weight of the item, 0.68. Essentially, like, nothing. Without anything inside of that, it held nothing. Six millimeter static rope. Oh, that came out real easy. I thought that was a better placement. Apparently, it needs a much more tight constriction. I reset that monkey. This used to be in there, so if you do get it in there, oh, look how much lower it is than when I first put it in. I swear this is a monkey fist, you guys. It just does not stay round. Eight millimeter monkey fist. A little flat on the sides, but... 7.17. Three, two, one. Oh, that didn't even stand a chance. Sliding, sliding, sliding. Looks stuck. Looks stuck to me. It broke in the fist, and the fist is quite stuck, honestly. Man, I could really see that being a problem if you did take a whip that they're not gonna come out. I'd whip, I just wouldn't want to clean it. So this is our setup. It's working pretty good with, you know, our thing with the holes in the middle, and that, that's, that's stuck. If, uh, if you took a 25 kilonewton whipper, you might not get it out. It, uh, reached the max of the, the rope itself. That's not a monkey fist. That's crushed paw. What? It held 25 kilonewtons. Hey, I'll lead, you clean. I haven't whipped on a knot. I don't really want to whip on a knot. I also have not taken a whip on a knot for science, because the thing about falling on these in the Czech Sandstone is they do get stuck. They fix, and a lot of the popular routes already have fixed knots on them. Um, frequently at any crux, um, where people have been placing and then falling onto a knot, the knots get fixed, and then they sort of, like, just rot in the crack and, um, deteriorate slowly over time. More knots get placed near them. Um, I've done a couple of routes where there were, like, multiple fixed knots in any one location. Like, you get up to a spot where, like, a layback starts, and there's, like, four fixed knots that are, like, deep in there, and some of them are really old, and some of them are newer, and you sort of just, like, clip whatever you feel might potentially be worth clipping, because, honestly, a lot of the time, pro is so sparse. You just, like, take whatever you can get, and then maybe look up for backup pro that you can place. I clipped it, but I also backed it up with another knot of my own. I, I wouldn't, like, go to a spot where there's a perfect knot placement, place it, and then whip on it, knowing the likelihood of it fixing. Now I've just screwed up the placement on that route. Like, now there's just going to be cliff junk sitting there rotting and deteriorating and taking up a spot where somebody could be placing, like, actual real pro. Got it? All right. That's just your standard nut tool. While you're climbing in sandstone, you don't want to damage to get out the garbage that gets left behind, because you're using protection that doesn't work for ethics that don't make sense holistically. Yes, these getting stuck all over your rock doesn't necessarily look better than your rock getting damaged. It's got to be, like, some middle ground. But, hey, tradition. Chalkstone, anybody? So we will pull this. That slipped past two rocks. There are two rocks in this thing.