Tying a button knot soft shackle WITH break tests - for slacklining and highlining

You want to learn how to actually tie a button knot? Check it out on this episode of How Knot to Highline. Hey, I'm Matt Stolling here with the Zen Lunatics. Today I'm going to show you a method of tying a button knot for a Dyneema Soft Shackle. I'm going to teach a method in hand as opposed to on a table because I feel it's more practical. We're going to show you with the perspective over the shoulder so it'll feel more like you're tying it. First, we're going to tie it with two different colored ropes so that you can see the interactions between the two and how everything goes together. Then we're actually going to create a soft shackle out of Dyneema together. We just might break it for you at the end. This method of tying and utilizing a button knot was originally developed and popularized by Brian Toss based on previous developments in lanyard and button style knots. Originally used for decorative items created by sailors. At its core, the button knot is a conglomerate of a wall and crown knot, and then another wall and another crown to finish. So if you know how to tie either of those knots beforehand, it's going to make this whole process much easier. In a wall knot, the ropes spiral around and through each other to create this shape. And a crown knot is essentially the same as a wall knot but in the opposite direction, which really is the first step you do in tying your shoes. So now let's tie the button knot with the camera over the shoulder. So the first thing to take note of and one of the most important things to remember throughout this entire process is that all moves are going to be made going the same direction, turning the same direction, which in our case will be clockwise. So the first move we make will be to tie a wall knot. If you don't know how that's done, we're going to take our right hand rope, the orange one, make a half twist and cross in front. And then we're going to take the blue rope and wrap around the orange rope and then through the orange loop. So now we have this figure where the blue goes through the orange loop and the orange goes through the blue loop. Check it from the top, everything is rotating clockwise. So throughout tying this, I'm kind of always keeping a hand at this throat of the knot just to help keep everything together. Going to make sure everything stays in a nice tight shape. And the next step is to tie the crown. This is a step in which a lot of people make a simple mistake tying the crown in such a way that the rotation reverses. So the way I remember it, the quick and easy way without having to go through and check, is that if I'm always tying clockwise this direction, I'm going to start with the right hand side. The one that comes out towards me is going to cross on the back side of the one moving away from me, the orange rope. And then they twist just as if you were tying your shoes, right? You make that first twist. And so this is your crown. We're going to bring it to about here. Make sure everything's in shape. Again, if you want to check to make sure that everything's gone the right direction, what you do is you look at it from the top, and you open everything two-dimensional. So now we can see that the orange rope makes a clockwise turn, continues clockwise through the blue one, blue rope, clockwise, clockwise. Here's the step where things start to get a little bit complicated and where most people have trouble. Begin again on the right side. We're always doing the moves right side first, then left side. So I'm going to take the orange rope, and it's going to go again through the blue rope. What we're doing here is creating this walnut again. So we're just creating a second walnut on top of the first one. So orange rope through the blue loop. I'm going to set it up so that it's parallel to the previous orange loop here, and make sure that my blue rope stays on inside the one that comes from the crown. And then, just as we did in the first step with the original wall, take the blue rope around the orange one. And you can see here where the blue rope and the blue rope are parallel, and the orange one goes through both of those loops. And our blue will continue through both orange loops, but not through the blue one. So we have this. Common mistakes during this step include passing the orange rope not over the first lead by going through here. That's wrong. Or when they make one this way, and then when they go to do the second step, they'll choose the wrong two out of three loops here. So it's possible to go through all three of these loops, which is not correct. Or to go through, say, only one or the two inside ones. All of those are incorrect. You want to make sure that you're going through... The blue one crosses through both orange loops, but not on the inside of the blue one. So again, this step, after we've tied our crown, start on the right side. Orange strand through the blue loop, lined up parallel with the previous orange loop. Blue rope travels around orange one, and through both loops of the opposite color. So check it again. You should have this shape. The final step is the last crown and tuck. So we will kind of open this up two-dimensional, and I look at it from the top. And what I do is... You have the two ropes flat here. I'm going to pinch it like this. So I have my thumb in between them here, and my pointer finger in between them here. And those are going to be kind of like placeholders. Squeeze them up between all these loops here. And then we're going to open up the crown, the loop that's created in the middle here, between the two ropes. I'm going to open that up. And again, I'll start on the right. I'm just going to go to the top, and then dive down. And in this case, the one that's coming towards me is going to move away from me. And so I'm going to pass that along the stem where I've held the place with my pointer finger. Just right through there. Hold that in place against the stem here. And then the same thing with the orange one, except I'm going to come down through that same hole. Again, these moving clockwise around each other, and just down to where my thumb is on the other side. I'm going to pinch that there. And this looks like a mess right now, but this is the knot. It's right. All right, that last step one more time, but I'm going to open up the crown a little bit more here. So it's kind of clear. Again, placeholders with the fingers in between all these loops. And look at it from the top. You can see that pretty clear eye in the crown here. One, two, three gaps. We're going to open it up and go through the middle and see how you can see through that directly down the center of the knot to where you've held the place with your pointer finger and your thumb. So we'll again start with the right side. Blue rope in this case. It's going to come up and down through that crown to the opposite end. So it's coming out of the previous loop towards me. It's going to move to the side of the stem opposite me. I'm going to go down to where my pointer finger is, hold that in place, and then with the orange side up and tuck. Make sure that the top one or the one moving away from you is on the right side and this one's moving to the left so that they maintain that clockwise rotation. I'm going to put that down through the stem. You see if I look at the bottom of the knot here, I have my two main stems and these are taking up opposite corners. And then to begin dressing it, I hold these tails in place and I tighten the very first move. So it's going to look kind of like a mess at first. One thing that helps to double check your work before you start setting and tightening this and really committing to it is you can kind of flatten it. Make the whole knot in two dimensions. If you work with it a little bit, you can see this very regular pattern that shows up. So a way to check it is kind of flattening it out in two dimensions and checking that it makes this very regular spiral weave shape. So we can see pretty clearly that everything is moving in the clockwise direction and you can check by following any of these strands and it has a regular over two and under two pattern. So watch, we'll start with the orange rope, under two, over one, two. Under two, over two. And it will continue that way through the entire knot. So once you finish the final step and you're confident that you've done all the steps correctly, everything is in the right direction, I'm going to begin by keeping the free ends static while I tighten the stem, the very first step. So I'm just going to pull the stem here, pull those in. And then it's as simple as just beginning at the start of the rope and following through, just making sure that everything starts to tighten up. And it looks like chaos now, but bear with me. I promise this whole thing will come together and start looking very pretty. So just wherever you see a loose bite, move it clockwise. It doesn't even matter the order. So now it's starting to take a little bit of shape here. Starting to be solid. If I flatten it, you can still see the regular pattern. It's kind of cool. It creates this little spiral galaxy kind of pattern, much like you can see the blue spiraling out from the center and the orange spiraling out from the center. But I want this to take a kind of ball shape. So keeping track of where my tails are. Again, I'll just do the same thing over and over again. So first move of the blue, just follow that through. Move everything clockwise. And I'll do the orange. So it's kind of starting to take this ball shape. And at this point, it gets a little bit difficult to start tightening these with your hands. So I recommend using an improvised kind of marlin spike. In this case, I have a little aluminum spike. But you can use anything like a pin. Just don't have a sharp point on it that's going to snag the fibers. So again, I'll start. I'll just look for that first blue move. Comes around here, up through here. And so I'm just going to get under there, pull that bite super tight. And then I'm going to move on to the next portion, get under there, tighten that. Just keep moving around. Orange tail, first bite. Second bite, tighten. Follow it through. Pull the next one. Follow it through. Pull the next one. And that's the final move. Pull the tail through. And then to really kind of make it squish together, I just choke it. Bring all these spirals up. And you should have this easily checkable kind of twisting spiral pattern along the bottom. Two orange, two blue. And then on the top, kind of have this cross-hatching spiral pattern. So now we're going to create the entire soft shackle from the beginning. What I have here is a four-foot section of Amsteel, which should give us a finished soft shackle length of about three and a half inches here. If you want longer, this was a six-foot piece. Gives you about seven and a half to eight inches of working distance. So we'll begin by creating the eye of the noose first. You can get an estimate for how large this eye needs to be by taking four strands of Amsteel. I'm going to take this just from the other end of your spare soft shackle rope. And I'm going to just choke this around. So this is about how big the eye needs to be in the final steps. So what I'm going to do to make sure everything comes out evenly, is I'm going to mark the throat, not the middle here, because that's going to be the point at which this dives through to make this all even. So about there. So I'm going to take my, in this case, improvised fid. Kind of more like a marlin spike. Open up the Amsteel by just kind of compressing it here. And I'm going to do my best to dive exactly through the middle of it. I'm going to open these up and I can see the hole on the other side. So I'm going to go through just like that. And at this point, you'll want to double check to make sure that you've gone through the middle by looking at either side and making sure you can count six strands. So one, two, three, four, five, six. On the other side, I see one, two, three, four, five, six. I'm going to open that hole up a little bit. Take the far end. And you can use your fid as kind of a guide to get the tip through. Try to do your best to avoid catching any of these strands on the end. I'm just going to take the slack through there. So this will be the eye of our noose. So we're going to begin tying the button knot. And even though obviously our soft shackle isn't going to be only this short, it's nice to have as much tail as you can to work with. It makes tying the knot much easier. So I'm going to begin by tying only a couple inches away from the throat of the eye here. So first, I tie my walnut clockwise in that direction. Hold it. Go around that tail through the loop. Pull it nice and tight. Next step is the crown side that comes out towards me. Begins on the back side, just like tying your shoelaces. So I like to hold these ends, these ones that come up before they form the crown, as close to the inside of these loops here as I can. So I'll hold it nice and tight like that. I'll take this tail, starting on the right side, moving clockwise and into the loop on the left side. Line it up parallel with this. This is where it becomes important that you're holding this one on the inside. So these two loops are parallel. Go around this one. Two loops are parallel. And then this one through two here. So, quick double check. Each end passes through two loops, one extra one on the inside. So, final step. We're going up and down through the crown. Look at it from the top. Look for this very distinct eye formation in the crown. We'll find those places with our pointer and thumb. You can look down through the center of the knot. So I'll start on the right side as always. It comes up, dives down through the crown, onto the side of the stem where my pointer finger is. Hold that in place. And then left side, up, down through the crown, making sure that we're still rotating clockwise. Hold that in place with my thumb. And then pull the first ball tight. From here, we'll begin to set and dress our seemingly chaotic knot. Is to move it in the clockwise direction. So, clockwise, clockwise, clockwise, dive, clockwise, dive. Just work it around like a gearbox. You can already see it starting to take shape. There's our regular over two, under two pattern. It's kind of a beautiful looking Celtic knot shape. We move on to using a marlin spike or an improvised marlin spike. Get this thing dressed as nicely as we can. And to really get this set where you want it, you're probably going to go through and do this a lot of times. Hamsteel is particularly slippery. It doesn't like to stay where it's set. Your tails should end up catty corner from each other if you make a cube with these four here. These are on opposite ends of these two parallel stem strands. So, because I've begun by tying the knot closely so that I can have as much tail as possible to make tying the knot itself easier, I now have a lot of extra tail here. But it's important to get the shape here before we start fine-tuning the length of our shackle here because it just makes the dressing process a lot easier. So, to fine-tune it, we'll just do the last dressing method we did just in reverse. So, I usually like to have about a three to four inch berry here. It really just depends on the finished length of your soft shackle because a berry longer than half of the total length of the soft shackle has to go around this turn and it makes it a little less pleasurable to handle. I'll just back this up to... that's about three to four inches. And same thing, just in reverse. What I like to do when finalizing is if you have four extra strands laying around, put that through the eye, tighten it up, and then finish dressing the soft shackle to this length here. And we'll just do all that dressing that we did before again. Amsteel has a polyurethane coating and lots of dye on it. It will get on your hands. Make sure to not rub your eyes or put your fingers in your nose or your mouth or anyone else's orifices while working with this. So, now that it looks like I've jerked a smurf, let's talk about setting the knot. There are a couple different schools of thought here. The most common being that you want to proofload this and set the knot before doing any tail burying. The most common method is if you're using 6mm Amsteel, which, in my opinion, you don't need anything more, use a 5mm Kwik Link. You slide it over the body of the soft shackle, the tails through there as well, and you're just going to cinch this up against the throat of the knot here. And you'll connect this end and this end to whatever your preferred tensioning system is and pull this to about 1,000 or 2,000 pounds, whatever you can achieve. Pull out your Park Longline system and just crank it. You want to probably back it off and rotate it a few times just to make sure that everything is tightening evenly and you're not creating any hot spots of deformity here under the button of the knot. We're out here setting the knot for our soft shackle. We have connected it to our standard long lining pulley system. We've got it connected to our 5mm soft shackle here, choking the throat. And, you know, get out your most powerful pulleys and 20 of your strongest friends and start cranking it. We're at about 9 kilonewtons or 2,000 pounds-force, so we're going to tell our friends to stop pulling. We're going to turn the knot in the Kwik Link. Now we've rotated the knot a few times to make sure that everything sets nice and evenly. You want to just make sure that when using 5mm Kwik Links in this application, in which we're unfavorably loading it and putting massive amounts of tension on it, that you're not going to use this hardware again for life-supporting applications such as highlining or climbing. Now we're going to talk about burying the tails. I've already buried one tail here. The first step is going to be creating a taper. This is my preferred tapering method. I'm going to mark every other set of adjacent strands here, and I'm just going to pick those out one by one and cut them. So now the tail here comes gently to a point here, gradually decreasing its diameter. And this is important for the bury, because it just makes the soft shackle look a lot cleaner. In theory, how gradual it changes diameter is important for retaining strength. But in this case, the tails are not necessarily integral to the strength of the soft shackle. So now that we're tapered, we're going to bury it. My preferred weapon is the wire fid. It's easy enough to make at home with any baling wire that you have laying around. You just straighten it out and pinch the tip closed like this with a pair of pliers. So we're going to see how far down our tail goes, to about here. But when the diameter of this line is increased, this leg is going to shorten a little bit. So we'll just pick about an inch or two beyond where this ends, and we're going to insert our wire fid through the center of the amstiel, up through the core of the hollow braid. Just pass it up through there, up to the point at which you want to begin the bury, which is not terribly important. Exactly where you choose, just somewhere within about a half inch of where the tail comes from the knot. So I'm going to come out right there. I'm going to open up the end of my wire fid, put the last four or so strands through here, move it up to the top, let it pinch down nice and tight. Just pinch that there, fold it back, and then make sure you squeeze this so that this is nice and wide, allows that end to go through smoothly. Pull it out through the end, remove it from your wire fid, and then milk the sheath back over the core, and it will suck into the middle there. Now we have a nice, clean, finished soft shackle, tails buried and all. What do you say we figure out what this breaks at? All right, let's find out if we've done this right. Our soft shackle broke at 16,400 pounds, or 72.9 kilonewtons. It's broken at the noose, which is expected. And it looks like everything has gone according to plan. Hi, I'm Ryan Jinks, and I'm going to share some footnotes about some research we've done in the last two weeks since filming Matt Stolling showing us how to tie the button knot. Now, there's two different ways we found to tension this knot, and that is the way we showed you with the quick link. And you can bury or not bury the tails first. That is an option. And the other option that we found is if you just put the noose right over the head, you're supposed to tighten them before using it, but you can use it to tighten it. So if you just put it in this configuration, and the trick is take this and then flip it over the other way, so it creates more of an even pull on the button knot. And then you do that two, three, four times, back and forth, and pull it harder and harder each time. And then pretty soon this gets to be rock hard and keeps its shape. If it loses its shape, it becomes deformed and the noose slips off the top of it. That's why it's important to tighten this. So we're going to do an experiment where we do with the tails pre-buried with the quick link. We're going to do it with the tails not buried with the quick link, and also those two options with the noose over its head. For 4.9 kilonewtons, that's a little bit over a thousand pounds of force. Here we have buried tails without the quick link, and that knot is looking okay. The unburied tails with the quick link has this strand that's loose right here, and kind of looks a little funny, but we haven't switched that around yet. This one is with buried tails, and the knot seems to look pretty good. It's not deforming in any way. Make sure you're not using quick links for highlining after you use them for this. And then this one is without buried tails, and the knot seems to be... this one seems to be okay. Okay, I flipped them all over and they're at 1,500 pounds or 6.7 kilonewtons. This knot is looking okay. This one is okay, and this one still has this loose strand right here, and right now it currently has 1,500 pounds of force. 2,000 pounds or 8.4 kilonewtons. Fourth tensioning at 2,500 pounds of force or 10.7 kilonewtons. So we got a couple ugly knots and a couple good ones out of this. These were the ones with the quick links with the tails unburied and with the ones buried. The ones that aren't buried, you can see here that this crown is sticking up quite a bit, whereas that one seems more of a flatter mushroom. You want something underneath here for the noose to grab around. So that seems pretty awesome. This one, however, doesn't seem to have a lot there for the noose to catch around. It's really important to understand how these things work so you can identify whether or not yours will. I'm fairly confident that will hold, however, because the sides stick out so much here. But you can see that it's not ideal. So the tails not buried, lost in that case, and here we have the ones that were girth hitched around itself without the quick link. And again, the tails not buried left the crown sticking up quite a bit. However, what I liked about this one is you can see here that the head has a big underside here, and I think that's pretty good, pretty safe. And this one is with the tails buried, and it just looks a lot more symmetrical. It's not too flattened out on the top. I do like this one the best since it's not common for people to be able to take things up to 10 plus kilonewtons. Just for reference, you can pull 100 pounds, okay? Most everyone can pull 100 pounds. If you have a 15 to 1 pulley system, you lose some in friction. You can get 1,000 pounds from your 100 pounds on that system, and you can put that on a short slack line or something, just direct if you want, and connect all of your soft shackles in a row together and tighten them that way. And if you get two or three of your friends pulling, you can get up to 2,000 pounds pretty reliably on a 15 to 1 pulley system. It's better to do this multiple times, changing directions, switching this back and forth. Whether or not you use quick links, bury the tails, based on our results here, bury the tails first, and then pull the crap out of these a bunch of times. The more you do it, the harder the knot will be, and the safer your soft shackles will be. And for reference, if it's untightened at all and unburied, it brought it down all the way to 10,000 pounds of breaking strength. Rather than the 16,000, we reliably get 15 to 16,000 pounds reliably on our buried tails and hardened knots. So it's not like you're going to necessarily die, but you can see there is a huge strength reduction when you don't tighten this knot or bury your tails. And our last pointer is another way to bury your tails, is with a FID. And this is an 8mm FID. This is 6mm Amsteel. Now let me show you a trick. If you use this 8mm FID, it does fit inside of 6mm Amsteel. Just push it in, rotate it, it fits inside. Now, 6mm FIDs, and this is a lesson I wish I knew a long time ago, does not fit inside of a 6mm FID. It's the outside diameter is 6mm. This fits inside. You lock it on that little clip on the end, and you can pull it through, pull it to the end, and it's pretty simple to do that. It's a little harder when you taper your tails though, as going in this direction and bending it over is tricky. But for whoopee slings, this is the answer. 8mm FIDs for 6mm Amsteel. And if you don't taper the ends, it comes to more of an abrupt ending, like this one is not tapered, versus this one has a smooth transition when it is tapered. But I don't think it really reduces the strength, and when you go to use it, it really doesn't affect the function. It's just a little bit more professional if you have it tapered. As you can see, this one is not. And just for fun, we'll replay the first break test we showed at the beginning of the video. That is 9mm Amsteel, and it broke at 179kN or 39,700 pounds of force. That is my favorite break test because it was so violent. We have a lot of videos talking about how to use these, how to connect high lines together. You can see in my rigging examples, me using them at the anchors, and we discuss rope on rope, when this is bad and when it's not. The short story is, if things are rubbing on it, that's bad. If things are just statically holding it, that's fine. Now, if you do put tubular webbing over this, that is not abrasion protection. That is abrasion notification, because tubular webbing has no abrasion resistance. So if you start to see wear and tear on your 1-inch tubular webbing, you'll know to replace it or do something different with your soft shackle. I have not really ever padded mine, and I've been using mine for about four or five years now, and they still break at full strength. Depends how you're using them. I do suggest you do pad them. It's just don't be delusional about the fact that tubular webbing is not your end-all abrasion protection. So thank you, Matt Stolling and Lorenzo DeMuro, for helping me with this episode and showing us a better way to tie the button knot than in my previous video I did about two years ago. They're with the Zen Lunatics team. Check them out on Instagram to see what kind of projects they're up to, and if you want to hire them for any projects that you want to do. And it does seem sketchy to risk your life entirely on a fancy little rope with a cute little button knot on the end. So therefore, you shouldn't highline. Hey, thanks for watching, but don't be an idiot and try highlighting your first time without going with someone who knows what they're doing. These YouTube videos are just to help you have a basic foundation of knowledge before you go with someone who knows what they're doing so you can learn pretty quick in person. If you don't know any slackliners, you can go to slackademics.com slash groups to find over 1,300 Facebook groups all over the world where you can find a slackliner near you. And if you would like to hire me to do a class or do a guided trip with you, contact me on Facebook and I can quote you a price. And we put out all sorts of videos about highline rigging, highline examples, and a few funny ones. We put out a new video every Wednesday, so be sure to like, follow, and subscribe so you don't miss one. Cheers.