Rope Access: Is the death knot a myth???

The scaffold knot is a very common knot in the rope access industry. As well, you can find it in the caving industry and starting to find its way into the highlining communities. We have the scaffold knot and the death knot. However, they look very similar. Can you tell the difference? Today on How Knot to Highline, we're going to be pole testing both of these and a variation of the Is the death knot a myth? Hi, I'm Ryan Jinks, and welcome to my Slack Snap Lab, where we are going to test the scaffold knot, the death knot, and a variation of the correct way of tying the scaffold knot. Now, a scaffold knot is kind of like a noose. I was corrected that it's not a noose. The noose is completely different. But if you pull the load strand, this loop gets tighter, which is why I thought it would make for a great noose. That's a morbid joke. Anyways, the tail, if you pull the tail, it doesn't do anything. But if you tie it wrong, which we'll show you how not to do it soon, and if you pull the tail on the death knot, the loop gets tighter. And if you pull on the load strand, nothing happens, so it never quite cinches up. Now, whether or not it pulls hard enough to pull the tail out and kill you, we'll find out. It has the reputation or the nickname of being called the death knot, probably for a reason. But we're going to find out how that works, since I can't quite visualize how it's going to fail so easily that it might kill you. Now, if you take the tail and you put it through the loop, that will prevent the noose or scaffold knot or loop from touching here. And so Mikey is concerned that might not be super good enough. And that's what we're going to test today, is the right way, the wrong way. And this variation, if you put the tail in wrong, how important is it to get this absolutely correct before it keeps you alive? And let me show you how to tie a scaffold knot real quick, correctly. Just to give you context, if you go up a rope and then down a rope, you're going to get a stopper knot. And I hope you put this at the end of all of your ropes before you repel. Now, if you do this with another rope, that's called a fisherman's knot. But now all we're going to do is make a loop first and then tie that. So with a loop, we'll go up the loop and then down the rabbit hole or however you're supposed to tie knots. And that allows the load strand to make that tighter. And if you pull on the short strand, it just cinches up that knot. Once this is tight, it's going to stay tight. How to tie the death knot is if you go up a rope and with the tail, you take a bite, which is just when you fold it in half and you stick it up there. It very much looks like a scaffold knot, but at the end of the day, the short tail, if you pull it, tightens the noose, which means if you pull on the noose, it's going to pull the tail, which is not the strand you're on, which is probably how it's going to fail. It'll come out and kill you. Variation we want to check today is to go up the loop like normal, but if you don't put the tail in the right spot, which in this case would be through these two strands, making the loop and then pass down. Now you're going to have this strand keeping these two strands from touching where these are supposed to be parallel and touching with nothing interfering them. This is not supposed to be there. This ideally would be next to them, and that is the correct way it's supposed to look. What's nice about the scaffold knot in the first place I saw. All right, hold on, hold on. All right, so I'm going to take over here. My name is Mikey from the Rope Access and Climbing Podcast, and today I'm going to be kind of giving you a little bit of a rundown of what we use this knot for in Rope Access. So today I'm going to be showing you the three most common places we use this knot in the Rope Access industry. This knot is also commonly used in the caving industry and starting to trickle its way into the slacklining and highlining communities as well. The first place and the most common place to find the scaffold knot being utilized is on our cow's tail. So the cow's tail is a lanyard from the harness waist connection, and this gives me the ability to attach myself to something. Generally attached to the harness with a figure eight and then you got your scaffold knot here. The nice thing about the scaffold knot is it prevents the carabiner from moving around, so it keeps its orientation and it gives us more shock absorption in the event of a fall. The second most common place you will find this knot being utilized is in a hauling and lowering system like I have here. If I pull this up, all right, and then adjust my back up, obviously, here on the load you're going to see that I have those carabiners orientated with the scaffold knot. And then the third common place where we're going to encounter this knot is when I'm rigging drop sets here in the world of Rope Access. All right, back to you, Ryan. And the first place I saw it was when I was caving with Rachel Saker in Georgia and Alabama. This was the personal anchor and it keeps the carabiner orientated so it's not loosely slipping around like in some of my other personal anchors. And then on this side, I would tie a figure eight to my harness and this would be my personal anchor and it's not very adjustable. These are called cow tails as opposed to horse tails. Put in the comments below why you think it's called a cow's tail. Apparently, this is a very common knot in Rope Access and you can put an adjustable thingy here to pull and adjust yourself, but at the end of the day, you're tied and it's fixed. Neato. We did another video right here where we tested a leash ring for highlines that the metal is just more or less a thimble for the rope. And since you don't want rope on rope abrasion, you have to have a knot that doesn't jump off of the metal. And so we do what I found out is called the scaffold knot. Kept calling it a noose and I probably taught a lot of people the wrong thing now. So make sure you subscribe so you always stay updated with correct information as I learn it. What we are going to test, mostly because this is what I have, is a 10 millimeter static rope. And we're going to find out in an eight to eight on both ends how much it breaks at so we can compare a very realistic use to this. And then we will go with the proper scaffold knot, the questionable scaffold knot, and the death knot. We'll find out how dangerous it really is. This is a lid because I'm bad at coordinating colors when I do things, as you can tell from the way I dress. We're going to start with an eight to an eight and this is already kind of getting undressed. I promised it was properly dressed before I pulled it to one kilonewton. And we have it attached to a span set, attached to a hydraulic. Hydraulic is held together with something super powerful and strong. Not really. And we have our DC pump and our hoses coming from the underneath side. This is a metal rectangle with a crane scale in it. Not that fancy. Here's our high budget slow motion. Let's get started. All done. It's okay. All right. 18 kilonewtons. It breaks in the knot like every time. And this side went flying. So I definitely need to shorten up the leash, but now we have something to base our next tests on. So we have a scaffold knot here. We're going to do an eight on the side you would tie to your harness, a proper scaffold knot where this one does not intersect the other two. And it's wrapped around two full times here, three on that side with a decently long tail. And we're going to find out if the tail shortens up and we're going to find out how much it cinches on here. Now, from my experience, once this gets pretty tight, pretty hard to undo it. All right. Did it break in the knot? Wow. Oh, that's neato. Wow. It broke right, I guess, here or inside of it. This is the tail or was the tail. Let's see if I can break it. See if I'm stronger than 20 kilonewtons. Nope. I'm just making you dizzy. Wow. That is interesting. The reason I find that interesting is because this side always broke first when we tested in our leash rings, because we had a big fat bend radius. But on the carabiner, it's not any more special than the bend radiuses that we get in the figure eight. Broke again at the other knot. That's amazing. But still technically higher than our first test. It went flying across the room and hit in the garage door, which is always scary to be standing next to this stuff. Get a guard protection, Ryan. Please leave that comment below. It's good for the algorithm. But to answer that question is, do you know how bad these videos would be if I had a plastic cover over all this? You're welcome. Anything that's risky, I stand behind my shield of confidence. And then, uh, or just leave the room. My button has a long wire. So don't worry. Okay, here's an eight and a scaffold knot with the tail going between the loop. So the loop cannot close right now. Find out if that has any effect on it. That is only 1.5 kilometers. And this was dressed. It's interesting that it undresses itself. That's a kinky knot. It shot all the way over here. Wow. That's warm. The carabiner was right here and it broke in where it, ooh, that is really warm. Here's our second one where it's got the tail in between. That is only 4.42. Let's break it. It's not breaking into figure eight. I have actually no idea where that went. So now let's test the death knot. Instead of going up a loop, I'm just going to go up the rope itself. And when I get to here, I'm going to stick a bite or a bend of the rope inside. This is definitely not something you should do. This is something we're testing in case you're not watching the whole video. This is called a death knot in the rope access culture. So it looks like the scaffold knot, if I pull this, it's going to come down. Now I'm going to pull it as tight as I can and we're going to just find out how it acts. We're going to find out if a longer tail matters. I'm just going to pull as hard as I can. Oh, that is terrifying. Ah, it stopped coming through. It's five kilonewtons right there. Wow. It didn't come undone. Oh, I didn't have peak force on. Damn it. Okay. We're trying it again. Tail is coming out. Two kilonewtons, four kilonewtons. That's a figure eight. Obviously it broke on this side. Whoa, it came completely undone, but I'll be at 17. Wow. Wow. Let's do it one more time since it didn't have peak force on. Let's do a quick one. So the idea here is this tail's going to potentially going to keep coming out and that's why it's called a death knot. The problem is it's getting cinched up or the good thing is it's getting cinched up here and that is why the tail gets stuck and is breaking almost at full strength. You can see there we are at three kilonewtons. Now, if we were to shock load this multiple times and not do a slow pull test, we could potentially get that tail out, but let's keep pulling on this. Less than full strength, but not necessarily a death situation. I am not advocating for this. I just find it very interesting is all. Are death knots a myth? If you don't tighten it super tight and you just kind of like shock load it multiple times, the tail could come out. Of course, it's very dangerous to tie a death knot, hence the name, but it's very interesting when you slow pull it. That's all I can say. It is literally illegal to do this in a rope access situation. Not that you would want to. Insurance and rules and everything for rope access are there for reasons and you really need to follow the rules, but it is interesting to see what happens when you don't. I did not notice any difference when you put the tail on like the wrong side and I actually found it quite hard to tie those wrong because it kind of wanted to seat itself in such a way that it would just kind of orientate correctly. Anyways, I'm not worried if you have the load strand on the right side of the equation. Make sure you bend the rope before squirreling up the tree and going through the hole. This is an interesting video because it covers rope access, cow's tails, which are used in a lot of situations, including the stuff I was doing earlier this year, and it really hits home to me because of the leash rings we are now using. I learn a lot from you guys, so please put in the comments below what you think of scaffold knots. Go check out Mikey's channel. Go subscribe to him. He's working really hard and it really, really helps and costs you nothing. If you made it to the end of my video, you win a free subscription to my channel. All you have to do is push the red subscribe button to redeem your prize. Come on guys, I'm trying to get to 100,000 subs here. Anyways, thanks for nerding out with me and we'll see you next time. One last demonstration to make sure you don't think that the death knot is okay to use. Pick the bite, I go up in it like I have shown already, and if you put the carabiner on here and keep the knot fairly loose, you have to pull the tail in order to get this to cinch down, which is a dead giveaway that it's wrong. And basically, if you cinch it down tight, it can look right. I didn't cinch up much of the knot, but if you go to sit on it, it's just going to come out and you're going to die. So please be careful out there and don't let sensational clickbait titles get the best of you. Cheers.