EXTREME Rope Jumping in Moab Utah - How much force is created on the rope and the anchor???

Have you ever wondered how much force a 102 pound Liz Thomas or a 214 pound Anthony Rico puts on a rope jump? Well check it out on this episode of How Not to Highline. I'm Ryan Jinks and welcome to my gear closet. When we did the rope jump at the Fruit Bowl in Moab, Utah, we stuck the dyno here on the people jumping to find out what the forces would be on the anchor and the ropes. My name is Anthony. I'm weighing at 214 pounds. My name is Robert and this is a rope swing and I weigh 155 pounds. And I'm pushing about 200 pounds. My name is Raquel and I weigh 193 pounds. Now let's jump, get it, into the numbers for this rope jump. Let me just real quick plug Slacklife Global. Slacklife Global is an extreme sports agency that is full service for any of your production, performance, and event needs. So if you need to hire an extreme sports athlete, a certified rigger, or a logistics specialist, or want to be represented by Slacklife Global, go to www.slacklife.global. Slacklife Global specializes in impossible. The sky is not our limit. So I present to you our dyno chart. And yes, I found another use for whoopee slings. So we have here rope jump science. Except I don't think this is science because we don't have very many data points, nor did we control like any of the variables because rope jumps take a lot of work and can't do everything. So we weren't quite sure if the second jump rope held any of the force and we weren't exactly sure of the initial force of the anchor before the person jumped. I do know that it was somewhere between a half and one kilonewton before anybody jumped. So we'll keep all that in mind while we go over the rope jump interesting information. So we have a couple of categories. We have the dyno on the ropes. We have the dyno on the anchors. We have the dyno on the rocks and a dyno on a slackline. But seriously, we need to understand the subjects before we can understand the forces. As you can see here, this is not to scale. Liz Thomas right here is not this big. She's much, much smaller in fact. And of course, Anthony here doesn't look like the Michelin man. I just, I just don't know how to draw muscles. So to start with the dyno on the ropes, we have Robert at 155 pounds, Ragwell at 193 and Homer at 200 pounds. Now we're not quite sure how much of the second rope was holding the force. So that could be the main reason there's such a variable in these numbers. But we tried to be intentional about only having one rope catch all the force. So Robert had 486 pounds of force or 2.2 kilonewtons. Ragwell was slightly less even though he weighs almost 40 pounds more. He's at 2 kilonewtons and Homer there gets a, wins at 3.1 kilonewtons or 690 pounds of force. It seems that people are around three times their weight is going to be the pounds of force on the line. Now I'm drawing a pattern from only three data points with unknown amount of variables. So keep that in mind. Now an interesting hypothesis that I do have is that a year prior, 2016, GGBY, a lot of people, including me and Kim, did tandem jumps, which is double the weight. So that could be pushing 1500 to 2000 pounds of force or up to like six or seven kilonewtons depend on the people jumping. One way to mitigate the force would be have both jump ropes hold the weight during the peak force of the swing. But that's not redundant. That's just holding, sharing the load. That doesn't even account for what happens on the anchor here. I personally don't think that two people should be jumping in a tandem jump because these forces right here are pretty acceptable. If I were to double them, it kind of gets sketchy when you start looking at the numbers. Okay. Now let's jump down here. See what I did there? Dino on the anchors, we had about half to one kilonewton on the main line before anybody jumped. So Liz at only 102 pounds, she put almost four kilonewtons, 3.8, or 850 pounds of force. We'll skip right over to Anthony here. Anthony was the most. He weighs 214 pounds and he put 6.2 kilonewtons on the main line of the rope jump. Now we tried to make sure only the main line was holding this force so we could get an accurate measurement. That's 1400 pounds of force on the main line. Now the working load limit of SkyPilot, which is what we use from Slacklife BC, is 10 to 14% stretch, but a working load limit of 6.4 kilonewtons. So we're like right there. Now we could put two lines, similar tension, so you got two lines sharing the load and then backups beyond that if you're trying to make things better or safer or stronger. However, I still don't think tandem jumps are a good idea. You can see here the numbers vary a bit. Mia is lighter than me, but she got a 5.8 kilonewton on the anchor, whereas I am 162 pounds and I got a 5.2 kilonewton. And Levi is slightly over 200 pounds and he got 5.4 kilonewton. So a lot of us were in the five kilonewton range, and I don't know if that means it was bottoming out on other lines or if the stretch in the rope absorbs some of the difference. But either way, it's safe enough. It's within the working load limits of all the anchors, the webbing, your jump ropes, everything's safe-ish. But like I said, these are not a lot of data points, so you can't depend your life on these. It's nice to have them if you are going to rope jump and not listen to me about not rope jumping. So anyways, it's nice to have a Rock Exotica dynamometer to do these projects, or I'm going to start using this for any highline I do now, because it's really nice to be able to work with real numbers, whether or not there's variables in there, because it really tells you what you're able to do. Working load limits aren't suggestions, they're actually something you should follow and how are you going to do that if you don't know what the forces are. So if you're going to do more or less exotic projects, it's worth spending the on a dynamometer. Now before we go, I want to make sure I make something clear. I know we glamorize rope jumping sometimes, and a lot of other videos glamorize rope jumping, but I beg you, please, please, please, please, please don't rig rope jumps. They're a lot of work to make safe, there's a lot more that goes into it than I could ever explain in a YouTube video, but there's things I don't even show you that are behind the scenes. It's not just ropes breaking or highlines breaking, it's like your rope being too long. There's a lot of things that, a lot of reasons you shouldn't rig this stuff. So highlines are a bit safer, but even those aren't even that safe, so therefore you shouldn't highline or rope jump. Hey thanks for watching, but don't be an idiot and go rig your first rope jump or highline without going with somebody who knows what they're doing. But until you get that opportunity, check out our other videos, and don't forget to subscribe.