Highlining - Soft Shackles with Button Knots

What are soft shackles and how do you make them? Check it out on this episode of How Not to Highline. Hi guys, I'm Ryan Jinks and welcome to my kitchen. Today we're going to unlock the secrets of soft shackles and show you how to make some. Disclaimer, this is for entertainment purposes only. Don't make soft shackles that your life is going to depend on after watching a guy in his kitchen show you how to make them. A shackle is a horseshoe shaped metal connector point and a soft shackle is a flexible connector point made out of Dyneema. The soft shackle is more of a stainless type but more highliners are adopting it into their systems because it's almost 10 times lighter and way stronger. A six millimeter soft shackle like this one is 12 kilonewtons stronger than an 11 millimeter stainless steel bow shackle. They are made with 12 strand Dyneema, commonly referred to as Amsteel, and there is an eye splice on one end and a stopper knot on the other. The concept is pretty simple. The noose goes around the eye and locks in place but making them is the tricky part. If you use soft shackles instead of hard shackles on just four web locks and two for your tension system, you could shave three pounds off your highline rig. The measurement of soft shackles are calculated when they're closed. Here we have a four inch and an eight inch soft shackle. It is measured based on the inside diameter. A variety in the of your soft shackles is pretty handy. For example, if you use two metal shackles, your web locks are going to be hitting each other. But if you have a short and a long soft shackle, they now sit offset from each other and they don't interfere with each other. If you have 30 feet of Amsteel laying around, you can make a 12 foot long soft shackle, which can be used as an anchor. If a quarter inch soft shackle holds 16,000 pounds of force and you have eight pairs and no loss for a knot because it's already been accounted for, then in theory this could hold 128,000 pounds of force or 569 kilonewtons. The double strands make it bulky and it's not adjustable so I don't use it but it's still a pretty cool trick. So we have three diameters here. Six millimeter, eight millimeter, and nine millimeter soft shackles. With the button knot the way I've tied them here, it holds 225 percent of the actual Amsteel strength. That means this six millimeter or quarter inch Amsteel holds 19,000 pounds of force or 84 kilonewtons. And this eight millimeter or 516 soft shackle holds 30,000 pounds of force or 133 kilonewtons. And this nine millimeter or 3-8 soft shackle holds 44,000 pounds or 195 kilonewtons. This quarter inch soft shackle is plenty strong. In fact, it's actually stronger than my weblock 3.0s right here. And you can buy them from slackline outfitters such as balancecommunity.com. But if you were to make one at home, it is recommended that you have a higher safety ratio in case you don't do it right, even though the knot still has to be perfect. And it's recommended you use the eight millimeter soft shackles which are plenty strong. One day I decided to overkill it and make a nine millimeter soft shackle. Now it is strong, but it's unnecessarily strong and it's so fat that it's obnoxious to use. I literally never use this. Caution, friction on soft shackles is bad. Because of the little melting point, any rope on rope action on a soft shackle can greatly reduce their strength or possibly even break them. Surprisingly they held up well during slack scientist shock loading tests, but they still need to be treated with love and respect. I will attach the link to these videos below in the description. It is highly recommended that you put a protective sleeve cover over your soft shackles. For my eight millimeter here, I use a two inch tubular webbing. And for my six millimeter soft shackle, I have a one inch tubular webbing. And this will provide a little bit more protection from any friction on its points of contact. Personally, I haven't used a cover on mine in over two years and I show almost zero signs of abrasion. I share that to prove Amsteel is durable, but I do not recommend that you go without a protective sleeve. Caution, sharp edges are really bad for soft shackles. For example, if you put them directly on a normal climbing hanger or an unapproved web lock, they reduce the strength of your soft shackle by over 50 percent. During slack scientist tests, they always broke at the point of contact with the sharp edge. And a protective sleeve is no exception for this rule. One last caution, pull on these correctly. Even though tests prove that this does not weaken the soft shackle, it always unnerves me when I see the noose trying to be pulled off the knot. Rather, it's better to pull it so the noose is pulling this way on the knot, orientating it correctly. On a more positive note, their flexibility allows them to be pulled tri-loaded or any other orientation without any reduction in strength. I've also seen these perform well with loose rigged highlines that are becoming more popular today. For example, when you see the slack line jiggling around a soft shackle like this, you may be concerned that the noose is working its way off the knot. But I have never seen it even come close to coming off the knot during a loose highline. If you are worried about your soft shackle staying in place during a loose highline, you could always add a piece of Velcro to it to help keep it in place. There are a variety of different ways to make soft shackles. The two most common ways are with a diamond knot and a button knot. A diamond knot is originally how soft shackles were made and it has the two tails coming out of the top like bunny ears and its average breaking strength is 136% of the Amsteel strength. Whereas a button knot has become more popular. Its tails go back down the legs and then get buried, creating a wider radius here and breaking at a whopping 225% of the Amsteel strength. So kudos to Brian Toss for coming up with the button knot which is almost twice as strong as the diamond knot. He's a yacht guy, not a highliner. The button knot is the kind that Balance Community sells and it's the kind that I make and like to use. So let's show you how to make a button knot. In order to make a 4 inch soft shackle out of 8mm or 5 6ths blue Amsteel 78, I cut myself a 6 foot piece. So the first step is to create the eye. You start by lining up the tails, going to the end of the loop. I want to leave enough room inside of my noose here to be able to fit 4 strands of Amsteel later. So I'm going to mark that right there. Now to create my eye, I'm going to go through the exact middle of the marking I made and I have to count 6 strands, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 on both sides to make sure it's exactly in the middle. If it's not in the middle, it will reduce the strength of your soft shackle. I open up the hole, I have it tapered in so it's easy to just pull that through, creating my eye. In order to make sure the diameter of the eye is correct, I'm going to take my tails, fold them in half so now I have 4 strands and slip my eye over them and cinch it down real tight and mark the other rope so I know my eye is always the correct size. Now that I've marked my eye, I just put it in the right place, it looks the right size and then I check my tails to see that they are the exact same length. Now we've got to figure out where we want to put our stopper knot. If I take my tails and stick it through my eye, I measure out the size that I want. If you want a 4 inch soft shackle, you're going to want to measure it out about an inch further, which I have here about 5 inches, because when you bury the tails back into here, it's going to get fatter and it's going to get shorter. So if I go right here and then I mark, this is where I want my knot. Now I can add a little constrictor on here. The different lengths and the different diameters of soft shackles you make will have different measurements, but in this case my knot is going to be at 12 inches from the top of the eye. And if you want an 8 inch soft shackle, you're going to have to add another 4 inches plus 4 inches plus a little loss for bury. So anywhere from 19 to 20 inches is where you would start your knot if you were to do 8 inch soft shackles. Now this is where I want the base of my knot, and when you're tying it, it's kind of a pain to hold this in place. If you don't have a little string to make a constrictor knot, you can just add a piece of tape to hold it into place that you can remove later. The more conventional way to hold that into place is to use a constrictor knot. So you take a little string like this, and you create what essentially is a figure 8, except I'm not going to go through there, I'm just going to set it on top. And it looks like a loose figure 8. Then you take the two loops, flip it upside down, and now you have a constrictor knot. You slip your eye over that, and then right at your markings, you constrict it. If you want more detail about the constrictor knot, theanimatedknots.com is a great resource, and its link will be in the description below. So now we're going to tie the knot with these two different colored ropes so it's easier for you to see, and they're exactly the same length as the soft shackle that we're currently tying. Step one of four is to pick a direction and go that direction. For me, I'm going to go clockwise, and I'm going to go under three times. Blue rope goes under yellow, yellow rope goes under blue, and yellow rope goes under blue again. And what you have here is a nifty little bow, where the blue rope's coming up, and the yellow rope is also coming up. The next step is pretty easy, but it's really important. You create a simple overhand knot, and so now you have your bow and a crown. It's very important to check your crown. So pull it somewhat tight, and see how your knot is sitting. Does the blue rope naturally go that way, and does the yellow rope continue to go clockwise in a natural circular motion? This one checks out. It's very important to check your overhand knot, because if these were to be switched, then when you pull it tight, in this case, my yellow rope still has a natural curve, but my blue rope starts to curve and then goes through, and it's not sitting very naturally. So now that I have my bow, and I have my crown, and I checked it, and everything sits and spins nicely, I'm going to loosen my crown back up, and these two tails are going to go through the opposite ends up through these holes. So I'll start with this side. I'll go up under here. Now I don't want these two strands to be parallel, so I put the blue strand in between them. Now this blue strand, keep it in between them, is going to go up through my bow down here. Now in order to keep going through this clockwise cycle, I have to go clockwise into the hole. Now I don't want these two blue strands parallel, so this loop that was created, I'll go in between there, and now this yellow rope is stopping these from being parallel. That is technically the hardest part. Now this is my bow in here, and this is my crown. I open up my bow. Very important to open up the crown. Now in order to keep with the clockwise motion, I'm going to go to the opposite side, not the straight down, but across here. Take this, also in the clockwise motion, and go down the opposite side. These two tails are going to go down the legs of my soft shackle, and hopefully, cross your fingers, you did it right, and you have a button knot. So there's two ways to check your knot. One is you kind of need to tighten as you go. So the first way we're going to check is you pull up starting at the constrictor. I'm going to go up. I'm going to go over two strands, tighten as I go, under two, over these two, under two, over those two, under those two, and then straight down. Another way to check is for parallels. You really don't want any parallel lines. It's okay to have two on the side there for a short period of time, and two on that side, but here you have over, under, over, under, over, under, all the way around. There's virtually nothing parallel except for here and here, and it's not very much of the knot. Bad example. I retied my knot, and I did the step number two, the overhand knot, which is essentially the easiest part, backwards. Then I finished it, and now we're going to identify whether or not we can see when the knot is wrong. We're going to start with the over, under, over, under. So we're going to start with constrictor. We're going to go up here, and it goes under three, over one, two, three, four, five, six, under one, over three, and then makes a sharp S shape. So that's obviously wrong. Now let's check for parallels. It has a sort of a parallel on the side there, but it opens up, and that's not good, and here we have another parallel, but it's more on top, and that's weird. It doesn't really have an over, under. I have a blue and a yellow parallel. That's weird. They should be crossing in and under each other like a weave. That goes over, under correctly, but this doesn't. This is just loose. So this is the kind of cluster that can happen if you mix up step number two. Here is bad example number two. I intentionally screwed up step number three. When you take your crown and you go up underneath the bow on both sides, but instead of putting my rope around it before I went up the other side, I just kept them parallel. Now let's inspect it. Constrictor knot comes up over this. It correctly goes over two, goes under two, and then it goes over one, two, three, goes way around here, and then it goes over one, under one, over two, and then down. It just doesn't pass. Let's check parallels. This side has parallels, but that seems awfully big, and this side doesn't have any parallels. It's just crisscross here. That doesn't pass. Let's check the weave. It's supposed to be over, under, over, under up here, but here it separates out, and I have something parallel on the top, so that's bad. These strands don't, well, it just obviously doesn't pass, but everything's just opening up, and that is bad all the way around. So this does not pass all three of our inspections. Bad example number three. It's time to put the tails down the middle. Everything is correct so far, but instead of opening up that center of my crown, correctly would be to go down there. I'm going to keep the crown closed. I'm going to go over the top and down the sides, and that is incorrect. Now let's inspect to see how our knot's going to look. Let's start at the constrictor knot. We go up, and it comes under two, so that's good. It goes over the same two. It also goes over this one, so that's one, two, three that it goes over, and then it goes under this one and over that one, so it should be going under two and over two. It finally goes under two, so that's good, under one, and then under two, so that's good. It doesn't pass all the way around, so it doesn't pass. Let's check parallels. This is parallel, but not correct because it's too short here, and this is more parallel than the other side. Let's check the weave on the top. Big O problem. These are parallel. That is not where you want parallel lines. This is supposed to be a weave. This obviously doesn't pass. It's very important to open up the crown when you're sticking your tails down the center. Welcome back to our soft shackle. Here we're going to do an instant replay of how to tie it correctly. I'm going to go clockwise. I'm going to go under that strand. Then I'm going to go under that strand. I'm going to go under that, and now I have my bow. Then I'm going to tie my overhand, and I'm going to check it. It seems to have a good natural flow. Loosen that bad boy up. I have my tails coming down. This guy is going to go in front of my legs, and I don't want this parallel, so I'm going to put that in front of it. Then I'm going to take a look at that. Then I'm going to go clockwise again. I'm going to go under this, but I don't want that parallel, so I'm going to go so that's crossed. Go in front of that. Now this is my crown. Don't lose your crown. Right there. Split that in half. You have your fingers on the constrictor, and then you take your tail and you go on the opposite side. Keep my crown open. Crown open. You tighten it up. Now it's time to check the knot. Start at the constrictor. It goes under those two, and it goes under those two. It goes over two of them. It goes under those two. It goes over two of those, under those two, and then comes right down the leg. My tails are parallel with where I'm going to be burying them. Let's check for parallels. This is slightly parallel, and so is that side. Nothing else is. The top is under, over, under, over, under, over. There's no single loose strand. This passes inspection. It's correct. Since there's more than one way to explain how to tie this knot, I'm going to put the links below in the description for other websites that do a great job of explaining to do the button knot. It's real important to tighten this knot. Make sure that your noose is exactly where you originally wanted it. You go up here, you check, and you want your knot to be at the base of that constrictor knot. Take that there, and then you use a fid or an awl or chopstick or whatever, and you tighten all these strands down until you get it tight. This is as tight as I can make it with my hand. It has a soft thud, whereas a really tight one is much harder. Brian Toss claims that during his break test, having the knot about this tight did not seem to affect the breaking strength, but Slack Science and balancecommunity.com, they claim that it's imperative for the strength of the soft shackle that this knot is as tight as possible. Either way, we're going to tighten this knot now. I'm going to take off my constrictor knot. I don't need that anymore. I'm going to put a 6mm quick link works good for this. 5mm works good for the quarter inch soft shackles. Either way, find something that snugs up real tight up against that knot. This is where a winch or a break test machine comes in handy, where you can put a good 2,000 pounds of tension right there, pulling right on the neck. You pull it tight, you turn it, and then you pull it tight again, and then you turn it again, and you keep rotating it, and then you keep putting as much pressure as you can on that, and it really cinches up that knot. I don't have a winch or a break test machine. I have just used my slack line. I put a 9 to 1 on it, and I pull on it with three people, and that gives me, well, at least a thousand pounds of tension. So that's what I've done on my soft shackles, and it's worked pretty good. Let's pretend that I've tightened my knot. It's raining outside, and it's a real pain in the ass. So now it's time to bury my tails. This tail will go inside of that one, and this tail will go inside of this leg. The strength of the knot does not come from the bury, so we don't have to go as far down as we can. The strength of the knot comes from having four strands to have the noose go around, giving it a fat radius, unlike the diamond knot, which only has two strands coming out the bottom, and that is why it's almost twice as strong. So I'm going to go about halfway down and build a taper. I hear a ceramic knife does not dull quickly with M steel, whereas this blade does. Anyways, you open this up to do a taper, and I'll grab three strands and another three strands, but I'm not going to cut them as far down this time. Do try to prevent to cut yourself. I'll grab three more, and I'll cut it a lot closer to the top there, about right there. Okay, now I have my tapers, and it's time to bury them. Since I don't have an eight millimeter fid, I'm going to bury it with my picture wire. I don't enter it here because it's going to shrink up. I have to come further back, come up, grab it, and pull it back through. And now our soft shackle is complete. Wow, you just made it through a 25 minute video on how to tie a knot. However, if you really want to learn how to tie the button knot, make a YouTube video on how to tie the button knot. I guarantee it'll work. But since you shouldn't be risking your life on homemade soft shackles, other than making them for cool, stylish necklaces, who knows? Maybe it'll be a thing. Therefore, you shouldn't highline with them. I'm Ryan Jinks, and this was another episode of the How Not to Highline series. It's a guide for slackliners transitioning into highlining. We are not here to spoon feed the right rigging techniques. Instead, we hope to empower slackliners to critically analyze any system that they're going to use. Risk awareness can keep people alive. Please don't rig your first highline without an expert. We have too many wonderful and generous people in our highlining community to go risking your life after watching a YouTube tutorial. Please let's keep this sport safe. And remember, since no system is perfect, therefore you shouldn't highline. Thanks for watching, and please subscribe.