Can you get away with less?

This is a fisherman's knot and we're going to explore today if you need to do a double fisherman's, a triple fisherman's, why no one uses a single fisherman's in climbing, and if it needs to be dressed or not. Now this knot can be used to make a loop of cord or tie the end of two ropes together. Now this is a rope I used a triple fisherman's knot on when I had to extend a 100 meter rope 70 more meters to do a rope swing. Now these are not the ends of the rope that I used. I obviously cut off just the part of the fisherman's knot because it's, well, it's very tight and I'm never going to get this undone. Mostly because we jumped on it several times but also because we pulled it 8 to 8 in the lab here to find out how much weaker it got because it was rock hard. You can see how much that knot crushes that rope and how much it's pinched there but ironically when I tied a figure eight and a figure eight on this end to see how weak it was the eight broke. Now triple fisherman's and two climbing ropes is super good enough but what I want to know is if we did a single, a double, and a triple in a variety of different ropes. So let's get started. Now to take the mystery out of this, if you go up the rope and back down you have a stopper knot of sorts. So that's a double. It's wrapped around twice and that's what we are going to do around the other rope. So you take the other strand and then you're going to wind this up, both of them, until you go through like that. Now how much tail do you need? Well, it doesn't usually suck up that much so you don't want it to be too short but that seems to be super good enough for most things I've done. And you do the same thing where you wrap around this side, go here, and you go back the opposite way from where that knot is. And you want to make sure it's dressed. And what we mean by that is it's not crossover funny. It's got to look something like this in order to work properly, which we will test later. Now you want to make sure you dress it so it's not tight on this side and you got a big old gap on this side. You want to turn them in such a way that they fit like two puzzle pieces would right next to each other. And so it's tight all the way around and you got your tails like that. And if you wanted to do a triple, one, two, three, and then you go through there. Same thing, you want it to look dressed like so. Now when you do this, I don't think you really want three on one side and two or the other, though I don't think that's going to kill you if you did. So the first material we're going to test is Dyneema or HMPE, which is made out of 100% tuna safe dolphin tears. Just kidding. It's just very slippery and it's a very good way to demonstrate whether or not it's holding because we've eliminated almost all the friction out of the system. Let's start with a single fisherman's and see how it does. Whoa, that was 15 to get that to slip. This is hot and glazed. You can see the one side untied itself completely. Now let's see what the double fisherman's does. So that was in there and that broke. We'll begin in the same way. So the single slipped, but these were the same. Let's go try it on a different material. So this is sterling power cord. It is 5.9 millimeters. It has a technora core and a nylon sheath. It is one of the things we stock in our store, and if you are going to buy some climbing gear, it supports what we're doing if you buy it here. Now the rule with this stuff is that you have to use a triple fisherman's in order for it to be safe. So we're going to find out if you only need a double. Fun fact, it's rated for 19.5 kilonewtons. And we did an episode with Tom Pendley where we tested back ties in this stuff. And it doesn't necessarily break that when you put knots in it, obviously. That was lower than I thought. Nine-ish. Technora doesn't melt, but it sure gets hot. Wow, it melted the nylon onto the technora. And so now it's all crunchy. We did not even get MBS in a loop. Normally, when you tie things in a loop, you get double. And when you put them in a knot, you get half. So you usually get MBS when you put it in a loop. But this stuff is just so static. Technora just doesn't handle the knots well. Handles the heat well. Let's do a triple. Man, triple fisherman knots take up quite a bit of material. So that's probably the smallest I'm going to do. There's about six freedom units. So I untied it to see how much material that took. It was about three feet to make a six-inch loop. That one did better. But you'll notice something interesting in the double fisherman. The technora basically slipped out of the sandwich. If you go frame by frame, you can see how it pulled through. But wait, there's more. On the triple fisherman, it did the same thing, just higher. We're going to find out a lot more about double fishermen's barricade because we're going to test if you have to dress them or not. I have a few here. This is a different color that have been dressed and ones that have not. And they're all double fishermen's. See how they do. That is not sitting against this well. Now for the dressed ones. So a couple interesting things here. The stuff we just tested was three years old. And so you can see between 18 and 22 where it broke with the new stuff is breaking between 15 and 16-ish. And you can see the undressed at 15.54 and 16.14 is about the same as when it was dressed. You can see how much variation you get with a knot because we were getting below 15 and above 16 with pretty much all the same stuff. It's just how knots work. Now, both times we tied to single, they slipped. So I'm going to try it with an eight millimeter semi-static rope, nylon sheath, nylon core, and see how it does with a single fisherman. Oh, that is crunchy. This was slipping until the friction got too bad from heating up the nylon. So that's why they don't recommend single fisherman's knots. It slips. But I found double to be super good enough. I'm probably, if I'm scared, I'll still do a triple. It's not going to hurt anything, but it does take quite a bit more material. Soon we will have the relevant episodes attached to the relevant product descriptions in the store. So you can go through there and eventually will be an encyclopedia of information. Whether or not you need the gear, you can reference it. So we've been open about two months now, and we joke that we ship two day, two day. And we've never missed a day yet. Shipping the day that you've ordered it by our cutoff time of 1 p.m. Six days a week. So whenever it makes sense, we ship it priority mail. So you end up getting it like within two days. We try to take the shipping thing very serious. So you get what you need when you need it. We almost spend more time on written content now than we do on video form. So if you want to see what we're working on, please sign up for our emails at hownotto.com slash sign up. And I really do recommend the episode where we tested the sterling power cord with Tom Pendley. And you can go check out that episode next.