Are Frozen Climbing Ropes Weaker? ❄ ⛄ 🌨 🥶

I have lost count how many times people have requested to test frozen ropes. I'm all bundled up ready to get our samples which we have done all sorts of. We are going to test a dynamic rope and a static rope in this episode of How Not To. Larry had to empty out his entire freezer for us to do this test. It's just ropes now. We are going to one bottle at a time fill these up until they're as high as they need to be to at least cover the rope. Hoping this slow-mo is going to make the ice go everywhere. I'm also doing another experiment. We're going to see if you like this discount game I came up with. Extremegear.org lets me tinker with their sales and so we're doing 24% off for 24 hours from the time I post this video on all the dynamic ropes on their website. But here's the catch. The discount code is gonna be put in this video one letter at a time so don't hate me. Extremegear.org supports this channel with 10% of whatever you buy on the site that's not on sale and the rest of the profit goes to the Cave Exploration Society's non-profit that operates the shop. They ship worldwide so if you buy climbing or caving gear get it here. The first letter is B. Now our first rope we tested was a BL Spellinium 10.0mm semi-static rope that was non-dry. It had no special coating on it. The ice just covers the middle of the rope and the ice would break off as we stretched the rope out but it still provided us with some good What are we going to do with all this ice? I'm going to irrigate the vineyard. The specs for the Nerds are that the core and the sheath are polyamide and the sheath is 41% and the core is 59% of the rope and this supposedly has a 25 kilonewton MBS. Check out this slow-mo. You can see the test bed moving and the ice is just floating there. Ropes always break in the knots. That is my experience. Ropes break in knots and we knew that so we froze the knots to see what would that do and of course the ice falls off but oh man the slow-mo was good. Oh my god that is a mess. Does freezing your rope make it stronger? The frozen side's still intact. Huh maybe it does. It reinforces the fibers. Dude what a mess. It's snowing in California. Is that not steam? No it could be. It gets hot in the knot. To have something to compare to we're going to take this rope that's not frozen as a control sample and break this dry non-dry rope. Even though the ropes have an MBS of 25 kilonewtons we will never get full strength with knots like these with figure eights. See our MBS is a myth video about that. What is crazy is we didn't get more strength from our control sample. What I've learned about science is you keep repeating the experiment until you get the results you want and then you only show that test. I have tested this rope multiple times for other projects and I've gotten 18 on those. That's just the variable of knots and ropes or frozen ropes are stronger. Shall we test the dynamic rope now? The dynamic rope we tested was a Sterling 9.8 velocity dynamic rope with a dry treatment. It has a 35% sheath and is rated for six UIAA falls. The specs say 28.8% elongation which is what you want when taking a whipper but that is the force you put on it when climbing not to break it. So it ends up stretching more than double to break those samples. Wet ropes and of course frozen ropes are going to lose a ton of their elongation properties which is why you only want to climb when it's sunny and 70. You know it may surprise you to learn that it broke a knot. No way this video is really boring. But as you can see the freezing the middle of the rope or even freezing the knots didn't really have an effect on it. Check out this slow-mo. In nine frames the rope completely recoiled. That is 0.009 seconds. Ever had break one side the core and the other side the sheath? Oh yeah totally. Like this is a very interesting result. Yeah. Our two dry control samples turned out noticeably lower than the frozen ropes. This is an interesting result when it scrunchies. The sheath gets all basically bunched up and it's super rigid. No way! What the hell? All right dude I'm gonna start freezing my ropes. So of course there are lots of other reasons that you would be very sad if you ended up on a frozen rope. Ascenders may not work. They would just slide. I've had this happen. And if the rope is super stiff you're going to have a really hard time getting it in your belay device. Another issue with frozen ropes or even wet ropes is they don't have the dynamic properties in them. Not quite sure why you're lead climbing with a rope that's frozen solid but if you were to fall on a rope like that it's not going to stretch which means it's going to hurt you and put more force on the anchor. Put in the comments below if you want to see a liquid nitrogen test because I don't see the point of that but for some weird reason if you want to see it we'll do it. Head over to ExtremeGear.org if you want to buy climbing and caving gear or use an affiliate link to buy any of the gear you want to buy down in the description below. It helps support this channel and don't depend on the algorithm to tell you when the next video comes out. Make sure you push the bell notification after you subscribe so you don't miss the episode where we test wet ropes. Hey thanks for making it all the way to the end. There were five R's in case you were wondering. Push a thing that looks like this if you like me giving away other people's profit. Cheers.