They say clipping it like this will kill you

We got a bunch of six mil accessory cord, we're gonna chase some rabbits. Let's go rabbit hunting. What are some things that you've been curious about or your audience has been curious about that we think we're gonna be chasing right now? Rabbits, bunny, oh yeah, the bunny ears cordelette. Let's go check that out. We have what is called in some circles the bunny ears cordelette. Instead of a cord, a cordelette with the ends tied all in one big loop, you can sometimes make a three point anchor with an untied loop by putting a bite knot, in this case an overhand on a bite in each of the two outside strands, clipping the inside strand and tying these off in a figure eight, or in this case an overhand on a bite. Three point statically equalized anchor. The question that a lot of people have with this, me included, is with six mil cord with a knot in it, is this potentially a sketchy thing to do? So is it gonna break here, or is the fact there's a single strand here, is it gonna break in here before it breaks here, which this has two strands working for that anchor point, and is there more force on this, which we're not gonna explore right now, but overall the strength of it? Broke here first, then broke that because that was stressing that part out. 15.4 kilonewtons. So do you think this anchor configuration can make it stronger, or do you think this is more or less limited to the strength of this typically breaking around five or six kilonewtons eye to eye? If this was like an eight on this side and an eight on this side, it's gonna break around five or six. So you're getting triple of that. So I don't think you're gonna do much more to make that stronger without a fourth point or something. I've heard some people say that they're not cause they're concerned with the bunny ears just because this is NBS of seven kilonewtons and you're tying a knot in it and doesn't that weaken the one arm and what if all the load shifted onto that one arm and this is assuming the load stays pretty constant like we just pulled. In that case, we're at 15. So even with six mil cord, I think this is an okay thing to use in some situations when you're probably not gonna have some crazy factor two fault. Bass rescue type thing when you have pickets that are far away from each other and you've got a relatively short cord and you wanna kind of equalize this, this would probably work okay. It's good to just know the number. An anchor is supposed to be serene, strong, equalized, redundant, non-extended. And is it strong? That's the question. So if this is a 15 kilonewton anchor, is that strong enough? Because I like to think of not having my anchor to be the weak point, but to be what I clipped to it to be the weak point. It'd be nice if it was 30 and this be like 25. It's rated for 22, but it'll break like typically 25. And so, and then your rope breaks a little bit less than that. And then you break a little bit less than that. And so progressively, like the bolt you connect this to is like super strong. So like progressively gets weaker until it's your spine, which is the weakest link in the system. What do you think? Is 15 enough? What's the next rabbit to chase? Let's have a look at cross-loading the sewn loop daisy chain. Here we have a sewn pocket daisy chain, which is designed for aid climbing and body weight only. Some people use this for a personal tether. Fortunately, not much anymore, but here's a general reason why. If you clip one pocket, you're relatively safe. But if you happen to clip two adjacent pockets, you're only being held in by these three bar tacks. And if you were to load this suddenly and these pop, the carabiner is completely off of the daisy chain, and so are you. I've heard various different strength ratings for this, two, three, four-ish. Today, we're gonna give it a try and see what we find on two or three different poles. How long have you had this? Long time. When I first started aid climbing, like 20 years ago. So that might have something to do with the stitching strength as well. Let's find out. Yeah, let's have the disclaimer. It's not new material. Oh, that is more than I thought it would be. So it has three bar tacks. There's three there. So this is a black diamond one, and this has two bar tacks. So I think that would have a lot to do with the strength, even though this is a way newer piece. Those BD bar tacks look a little more robust than the other ones, too. That's true. Yeah. I've seen people shortening up their daisies, like they're getting ready to jug. Yeah. They're clipped in to one, and they think, oh, I need to make it shorter. So instead of unclipping and reclipping, they rotate the beaner and clip both, and they think they're shorter. They are shorter. They're going to be shorter when they hit the ground. You shorten the clip-in point, but you inadvertently did it over the bar tack instead of unclipping and clipping back in. And that's one of the safety reasons why these have kind of fallen out of favor for aid climbing. I did not know that's how it happened. So we got almost 10, and that was our first thing. And then after that, it was five, between four and six, and got all the way up to 7.8. Oh, that's super damaged. Yeah, I guess it's straightening it out, and it's got all these loops in it. Interesting. Wow, that's really, really cool. Is it a good idea to ring load a normal bowline? I mean, no. No, generally not, but this is a bowline on a bite, which is a bit different. This is used by some folks for the fixed point lead belay, or in some cases, tied in through your harness as a point to make a rappel extension. Ring loading this is, I think, going to act a little bit different than a regular bowline. So let's check it out. Something to note is Dyneema is as slippery as a dolphin's back, or a Teflon. And so if it's going to slip, it's going to slip with this stuff. Did slip a little. Ah, dang near the full strength of a sling. Wow. The self-untying bowline. I hear they were easy to untie. Apparently they do that all by themselves sometimes. Yeah. If you put 20 football players on it. Just a length of accessory cord or rope, you can make a pretty good anchor. I'm assuming it's a pretty good anchor. Well, hopefully. I put it through all three bolts here, and then I'm going to grab it like when you're building an anchor, and pull it to here. Now you'll notice that I don't have the ends terminated up here, and I don't have the ends terminated to each other. So how does this hold? You ask. Is this is called a tailless BFK in highlining, which is a really stupid name for it, because it's got some really big tails. And this takes quite a bit of material to build, but you basically tie in these tails into your BFK. So after you get it to roughly where you want it, go like that, and then you tie an overhand or an eight. In this case, I'm just going to do an overhand. And this is what we do a lot of highline anchors with. And so I'm really hoping this performs well here, because we only use an eight millimeter rope for so many of our highline anchors. This is six millimeter. How much cord would you guess that is, if you had to eyeball it? So if that's five feet, like my arm span, it's about 10 feet of material, because it was in a U shape there. So I'm going to clip this to this. I'm going to adjust a few things, and then we'll just pull on this, and this is okay. Sometimes I'll make this piece longer, and then tie an eight on the end. And I use that as a built-in clip-in point, or I'll thread it even. I'll follow through like a Yosemite finish, take that, feed it back through, and tie an eight on the end of it. And then you now have a built-in personal anchor clip-in point, or you just put a carabiner on the end. And if this is on top of a cliff or a slack line, you just walk up, clip, and you don't have to have a personal anchor on your harness. Anyways, but for climbing, this could work too. Another point here is you have two strands coming from each anchor point, and you have a much bigger knot with more material here than our previous test earlier in the video. These strands out here were in the knot, and everything basically broke in the knot, albeit pretty high. This was 11 kilonewtons after it broke at 28. It's almost twice as strong as that first one that we tested. The bunny ears? The single-strand ones? Yeah, so it's not the six mil's not the problem. If you have enough material, you could do something that is really bomber. That's an impressively high number. For the same, yeah, for the same material, yeah. So lots of people think that you should not use six mil ever for a cordelette. That's kind of a talking point in a lot of climbing folks. I generally believe that too, but I have a lot more confidence in six mil now after this testing. Provided it's rigged in certain ways, and depending on your own level of risk tolerance. Mine is not yours. Yours is not mine, but the lowest we got was 15 with the single-strand cords with the six mil, and this one we just got now was 28. Almost double with slightly different reading. Now for reference, this is seven mil, and this is what a lot of people recommend, and you can see that there is a diameter difference there, and it doesn't seem like much, but it adds up, and it gets pretty bulky on your stuff. I personally like quad anchors because you can get that 30 kilonewton range. It equalizes super good enough. I'm usually big walling with it, but sometimes I would just take two climbing Dyneema slings off my shoulders and sliding X that thing, clip my master point in. I'm not worried about a little extension. There's a whole bunch of dynamic rope in the whole thing, and two slings in a sliding X is so strong. I think too many people are worried about extension. They're so wadded up about no extension. Are you wadded up about extension? A little, sometimes. Maybe I shouldn't be. I'm a big proponent of redundancy, though, and I'm a big proponent of extremegear.org and hownottoswag.com. We have the somewhat infamous Connecticut tree hitch. We're not gonna get into how to tie this, but a question that some people have is what does it slip with clipped one strand as we are now? It broke in this knot, broke in the eight. This is still. The hitch didn't really slip. Yep. And it broke at the eight. Yep. Oh my.