Are Sharpies on Climbing Ropes Safe? Break tests with Sharpie Permanent Markers vs Beal Rope Marker

Are you staying in the right spot? We gotta get this action shot here in kitty cat. Our Sharpies bad for your ropes has been emailed and messaged to me so many times. And I assume not because I'm still here. But Brent Roth here, who's part of our Canyon playlist, is gonna demonstrate that he actually uses the right product, a rope marker. And how he does it is because he tells how to make it work even better and all this stuff. And then we're gonna do some tests at the end of this video of me saturating some ropes in this material and actually testing some fingernail polish, which he uses for the ends of his ropes to make them easier to see. So we're gonna do a lot of rope and rope care and how to douse them in chemicals that aren't approved for any of this. Stay tuned. You didn't say anything in that intro. No, I just looked at you and shook my head in agreement. Yeah, it confirms that what I'm saying is helpful. Yeah, you're introducing me, which I'm gonna take over the video from here. Okay, so, yeah, say hi, my name's Brent. Hi, my name is Brent. And welcome to my gear wall, yeah, say that. Hi, I'm Brent, and welcome to my gear wall. What are we talking about? Keep going. You got the first line down. All you told me to say. You did it great. I'm just saying. I just thought you were here when I did the intro, so you knew what we were gonna talk about. So did you ever use Sharpies on your ropes? There was a time that I did, but I just got lazy, and I didn't like the way it marked the ropes. Like, it was just time consuming, sitting there scribbling, and it looked like, you know, a third grader did it. No offense to third graders. I mark my ropes, and I feel like it's only on that top surface. It doesn't stay on there very good. And yeah, it really smells funny, and I don't really know if it's bad for my rope. So we're gonna find out. I'm actually gonna, I'm looking forward to the break test. Yeah, I've been a huge fan of this product. One, it's a lot easier to use. It can be messier. You get it all over your hands, but I have yet to have an issue with it on my rope. Cool, he's gonna actually show us marking a rope, so we can see the process. Beal did not sponsor this, but you're more than welcome to, Beal, if you want. So this has a list of companies here, brands, and it says only used for brands which have approved it. So, not sure why it wouldn't work on one rope and not the other, but safety first when you're talking about liability. Can't be worse than a Sharpie. Anyways, do you know if this is water-based? Does it wash off with your hands? Yes, well, if you do it quickly. If you let it dry, well, then you gotta work at it. But you can't wash it off with your hands, with water. You can't, yes, but I use, a majority of my ropes are always used in water, and the real ink is still on there. So, I think there's a time limit you've got, if it's still wet, where it'll wash off with water, but once it dries on that rope, the water's not gonna. Obviously, you're not gonna use it while the ink's still wet. I mean, I have seen it, and I don't recommend it. Because you end up saturating your ropes so much that they could still be wet if you're doing it the night before, like I plan most my trips. Right, exactly. Gotcha, here you go. If it's wet, it'll bleed on everything else. So, we're gonna now carry the camera around, and show you ropes he's done in the past, how much it's worn off, ropes he's freshly done, and you stayed here through the whole thing. Congratulations. Thanks, man. Cool, so, let's get after it. So, Brent, are you trying to make me feel self-conscious about my gear wall? Because, like, I've never seen somebody with so many figure eights that look like they've all been on an acid trip. I mean, you really like going down stuff, apparently. I do, I do. And I get a lot of this just because I'm curious, and I like to play with things, as you would be to, like, an eight-year-old. Anyway, so, I buy something, I play around with it, I do some testing on it. But I don't have the ability to break things. Yeah. Yet, that's why all my stuff is in here. You should be the gear review department, because you've got the gear for it. You've brought these two ropes in. Show us the new one. So, all of my ropes, these are Canyon-based rope. This one is made by a company called Atwood. So, this is a polyester sheath. You can see, this is that Beal Rope Marker, what it looks like, I recently marked it. And it's worn into the material pretty well. I've got a rope over here that is the same rope that is a lot older and pretty well used. So, this is what it looks like after time. It had a pretty heavy season in 2019, that put some questionable damage in it. Okay. It's not fully retired yet, but I mean, it's obviously the mark is lasting longer than what the life of the rope that I'm using. But you're going down canyons with this stuff. Speeding up on them pretty hard. And it's very important, since we're doing retrieval systems, that you know where the middle of the rope's at, so I don't set a longer rope length than what I have to retrieve it. Yeah. So, the middle mark is very important for us. Because you're not tying knots in the end of your rope. You really need to know where the end of your rope is. Yes. Yeah, okay. Which will cover, actually, the nail polish. And why, when it gets damaged, and I cut off 10 feet off of one end, the middle mark is now kind of... This is another canyoning rope, so this is a Technora sheath. You can see it's about the same. This is an older rope as well. This is on its third season this year. So, you can still see it, but if you set it down, it's, eh, more or less. Whereas this, this is, that's a beauty. Brent, why do you have a bathtub for your ropes? Because I like clean things. Do you go down dirty canyons? I feel like that waterfall cleaned me out pretty good. Yeah, it's pressure washing, and then I do wash them in here because river water has algaes and microorganisms and stuff in there that if you don't wash it, it kind of gets this funky, low-water river smell to it. Look at that. Hey! I found the middle of the rope in this tiny little rope. Oh, wow, it's still wet. So, this rope is pure Dyneema. Okay. And you can see the ink is stuck to that. Dyneema had my doubts on whether or not it would actually work on this material. This is new for me this year, so I marked it only a couple trips ago, but this is its third time down a canyon in a very wet environment, and. What diameter is this? Is this six? This is six mil, yep. Wow, so you were a pro on floss sometimes. Well, we're working out the kinks. If you have big spaces in your teeth. Yes. This is floss. So, that's pure Dyneema. These are all the different materials that he has. Here's another one. Here's another rope, company of Switzerland. He's making canning ropes that actually float, so I was curious if the material was any different. It's another blended rope, and I marked the middle of it. What is this, Dyneema polyester sheath? Yep. Okay. And it's been an excellent rope. It does float really well, and it holds the Beal ink exceptionally well. Here's another one, another blended rope, and this one's on its third season as well. It's a Technora polyester blend, Canyon Lux, and it's holding color pretty well. I'll show you what I do, my process, for how I think I embed the ink a little bit more rather than just painting it on the surface, because I have seen situations where you paint this on the surface, and especially if you're gonna get it wet the next day, which can happen with climbers on a rainy day, and it bleeds all over the rope, and now you have like seven middle marks, and it's not really relative to what you need. Oh, look it, I got a buddy. I was trying not to laugh. I was totally paying attention. Squirrel running through the yard, and it gets Ryan's attention. So have you found a material that doesn't work on? Not yet. Okay. Not a rope material. Cool, well, let's see your process on really dousing this stuff. What you doing, Brent? I am getting ready to demonstrate how I find the middle of a rope that isn't marked, and I'm gonna try not to make a mess out of this, but it usually happens anyway. The way it's stored. So, I'm gonna take an end, and I find a place in your workspace that I would say you set up as a high directional, and I run one end through like that, and take the other end of the rope, and run it through a carabiner, and through another carabiner, and you'll see why this matters here in a moment. I line up the ends, and I'm gonna start pulling these evenly, and I'm just gonna start pulling this as fast as I want. You can see how this starts to twist, so rather than putting a bunch of twists in my rope, that second carabiner keeps them separate. Cool. So, it doesn't matter how long the rope is, this process can go fairly quickly if you don't have a lot of space. If you don't have like a 45-foot drop tower to... Yeah, 45-foot drop tower, 300-foot driveway, you know, whatever you need for the length of your rope, and then... Oh, that's pretty close. Yeah, okay, so... It was at the center, and then if I'm really being neurotic about it, I use a Sharpie, and I go, okay, that's where... But if that's not tested... Run number one went, now I'm gonna take this out, and then I'm gonna feed this back through, and clip this guy, and I'm gonna hold that center, and I'm gonna verify this one more time. And I'm gonna look to see if the end... Whoa. All right, so... Same spot. Question. With rope creep, over time and use, can the... If you keep using especially the same end for whatever reason, could your middle move? Based on, we can show you, some of the repel ropes I have, specifically with a Dyneema Core, the sheath will move, like, up to a foot. Okay. So if the center of your rope is so critical that a foot would make a difference, then whatever you're doing, every other time I would flip the end of the rope in use, so then if it's a one-foot creep, you get six inches on both ends. Got you. Theoretically, your center is still in the middle. And if you're that worried about finding the center of your rope, then I would just do this process regularly, and verify you're still in the middle before using it. But usually, one-foot difference shouldn't really matter. Oh, I think that was off. So this is why I do this process three times to see where am I. And I'm just kind of a Sigma 3 guy. A Sigma 3 guy. You're gonna calculate the standard deviation of how often you're wrong? Yes. And you can see the process is fast enough where it's like, okay, I'm gonna do this three times. Am I in the middle? So that's twice. So that middle's a little off. So what am I gonna do to fix it? Make your middle marker longer? Oh, yeah, let's just do that. So maybe I'll just make that middle marker all the way to this point. How convenient to have a rope we have to mark. Let's go ahead and do that. So this stands for? Soak all the ropes. Got it. Soak all your ropes. So I found the workspace, if I don't wanna get ink all over everything that I'm doing, I've been using this piece of foil to protect my workspace, and then I use it to dab the rope. So I put that in, and also this prevents the aliens from infusing my rope with any strange signals. So here's the section of rope that I'm going to mark. See, that's where I just marked it with a Sharpie until proven otherwise. This guy, watch how this works. It is reverse-threaded. Okay. I'm gonna take that off. And then there's this other piece that the first time you use it, this is reverse-threaded, has this cap in there that I'm going to grab very carefully. Oh, so it doesn't spill. So it doesn't dry out when I'm not using it. The first bottle that I had, I marked a couple of ropes, and then went back to use it, and it was a just dried out mess. So that, notice it stays right there. And then I'm going to thread this back on. Reverse. Reverse-threaded. Cool. And try to keep it off my hands as much as I can. Yeah. And then I'm just going to start marking this with a wheel. And look how nice and thick that is. Way better than a Sharpie. Oh my gosh. For me to do a length that long with a Sharpie would take like two Sharpies. Make sure we get all of it. That's pretty good. All right, so I'm going to set that over there. I like to take this foil. I'm just going to mash that in a little bit. And then I'll let that sit for a few minutes. Be right back. Oh no. Golly, gonna get a mustache. So after I've let this set for several minutes, I don't know, I've never really timed it, I'm going to come back with a blotting cloth or some kind to try to get it off. Or paper towel. It's a technical term. And I'm just going to blot the excess material off this. And then I do this because, well, I'm marking my rope the night before I plan on using it. And I don't want it to bleed all over the place. How long have you noticed it takes for this to properly dry? I usually will set it up overnight. Like, it's just not worth it. But this system, this technique, when I leave it hanging overnight to dry, I haven't had an issue with the rope the next day yet. So I would say the process that I have right now is what is working best for me. And keeping in mind that this also is a rope that I'm going to get extremely wet the next day. So I do that. And then I do this cool little trick that I carry with me. I come over here and I'm like, well, I noticed that if I put a lot of ink in this and I just let it dry like this, it actually gets really stiff. Like to the point where it's hard to, it doesn't set a knot well. If one strand in the knot has got this in it and one strand does not, just whatever. I've gotten, in fact, you can see how the bend radius changes a little bit there where that's older. And then that's the section that I just did. So to fix that, I come over here and I just start cycling this back and forth. While it's fresh. Yep, while it's fresh. And this is where I've gotten the best imprint of the ink into the ropes so far. These seem to be pretty dark for a while. So it makes your rope more flexible and deeper into the, so you're not worried about ink on the carabiner? No. It'll wear off. Well, yeah, it'll come off. This is an old used carabiner, but it just, what I see is that it just either goes on in the next rope or whatever. Super good enough. I did have a while and I'm like, okay, now I'm tired. And I'm going to leave that until it's ready to be back for the next day. How do you mark the end of your ropes? So it's really important for us in canyoning to know where the end of the rope is when we want to set specific rope length based on where the water is at or whatnot. And not all the canyoning ropes are easy to see in water. I mean, we've got some white ropes. The neon green ones are usually easier to see, but we don't get to control that. So I have learned, I marked the end of my rope with some really bright fingernail polish. And this stuff is, I mean, it's lasted a while. It's pretty thick. I'm not worried, is it going to degradate the end of my rope that I'm coming off of anyway? It doesn't really matter. But what you got to know is that not all rope materials are the same base material. So melting won't necessarily work. You can't melt dyneema to polyester or whatnot. So choosing it with super glue to seal the ends, and then I paint it like this so I can see it. So this is a soft shackle here. So you can see here how the super glue is what makes it look like he was able to melt it, but you cannot melt dyneema. That's not true. You can melt dyneema, but not together. It'll melt all right, pretty low, actually, but not in the way you want it to. So what's interesting is this rope has actually had some, what do you call it, creep, where the sheath has actually slipped over. So I can feel it right about, well, that's so stiff that I can't actually pinch the thing. But yeah, that's probably too stiff to put in the middle of a rope anyways. Yeah, I definitely would not want to mark the middle of my rope with this. Even if it proved to be safe. Yeah, it doesn't matter. It's just way too stiff and brittle. But I really like that for the end of a rope. I'm learning just all sorts of tricks here with Brent. And yeah, super glue, you just dip it, or no, you taped it. Yeah, so I run, I've got my little rope managing kit box up here. So I use electrical tape around the end of the rope first, and that's what gives me a little spot to cut, because as soon as you cut the rope, the fibers wanna get out of there, right? So I wrap it with electrical tape and I cut through the tape. Yes, yes. Cut a section of the tape off, and then you get a really nice, tight, bound material, and then I just start saturating the end of it with a bunch of super glue. What if that reduces the strength of the end of your rope? If I am down to this, relying on the end of this rope, and whatever I'm doing, that means I learned something from how not to highlight. So I'm not gonna do that, don't worry about it. I saturate the end of it, and then let it dry for a while, then I take the electrical tape off, and then start painting my nails. After the super glue dries, you take the tape off. If you're smart, you'll do that, or you can do it anyway. Otherwise, it super glues the tape to the rope. Actually, I've never had the super glue that doesn't really stick to electrical tape. Oh, all right, so it doesn't matter, gotcha. And that's what you did with our special soft shackle, is you electro-taped it. That was electrical taped, and then- That's why your soft shackle looks so excited. Yes, very excited. I learned a lot. I actually really like doing this channel, because I end up learning a ton. If I could subscribe to this channel, I totally would, but I can't, because it's my channel. If you could do that for me, I'd really appreciate it. God, I'm desperate. Even I subscribed, and look what it got me. You working till nine o'clock at night, showing us how to do stuff? All right. Just for the subscribers. So, you still have asked for me to break test ropes with Sharpie. Trying to do a really lame transition here, because I don't know how to use Premiere. All right, let's go to the lab. Welcome to the lab. Let's test it. Okay, so we're going to test two samples with the Sharpie, and we're going to put the Sharpie in the middle of the rope. If it breaks in the knot, we technically didn't lose any strength. And then we're going to do two ropes with the Beal Rope Marker as well, even though that's technically approved. And then we're going to do a short piece of rope, soak that, and find out if it actually gets into the core, especially with the way I'm doing it, where I'm soaking it super, super thick. Let's find out if this Sharpie gets inside of the rope. Oh, look at that. When we doused it the way we did, yes, on some of the strands, actually on the outer part of all those strands, the inner inner part's still good. Wow. Well, we really, really doused. I've never Sharpied a rope that good. Yeah. But it does get inside on the inner strands. Good to know. Let's find out how strong it is. So the peak force we got here is not 17 because I ran out of time. It took so long to break that stretchy rope. And look, that actually looks like the S&P 500. Do you know how good this video would be if it actually broke at the Sharpie? Broke in the knot. You can only see one tail sticking out of here. It broke inside of these knots here. And the Sharpie, as you can see, is basically not affecting the strength, at least in this test. This is not science. This is two tests. This is not recommended by manufacturers. Please don't use Sharpies on ropes. Die and then blame me. It is nicer to use a thick rope, I think. So we can really get a stronger test to find out if it's compromising the material. If we use something super thin, like five or six millimeter, well, we're not gonna get a high enough force to maybe compromise the polyester slash nylon. What is this rope, Bobby? Not sure. We're not sure what this rope is. And it's an old rope. But let's test the Beal sample we have, and then we'll go from there. Wow, this chart goes up and then down. I never was gonna suspect that's how these charts would look. Shocking results. The Beal rope marker also broke in the knots. Cool. So they're both showing the same results, but I also like the Beal rope marker because it actually goes on really, really good without having to open up Sharpies the way we did. I could talk this subject to death, or we could just end the video here. Let me know, please, in the comments below if you like the dual location where we did the thing with Brent and then came to the lab and supplemented the video with a break test. Subscribe, changes my life. It's not much of a commitment for you, and appreciate it. See you in the next video. Cheers. I mean, the rope's not strong enough to really put the pressure on. I'm just hanging on to this.