50 year old cave rope break tested in slow motion

Would you like to see us break a 50-year-old climbing rope that has seen neither daylight nor water in over 50 years? On this episode of How Not to Slack Snap. Hi, I'm Ryan Jenks and we've got Bobby Hutton here and we have a 50-year-old rope donated by Hunter Campbell who is a caver from West Virginia and he pulled this rope out of a pretty popular area. So it's been well used but it hasn't seen neither daylight nor water since its birth. So it's been a half a century but it is super super dirty. It's leaving a mess all over the garage and creating a dust cloud right now. Who's that character in Charlie Brown? Oh Pigpen. Oh yeah, Pigpen from Charlie Brown. This is something he would have. So tell us a little bit about this rope Bobby. So Hunter believes this was installed in the cave in the late 60s, early 70s. This is Gold Line which from my research is a one of the first ropes that was specifically made for climbing. Made by New England Ropes and also produced by Maxim Ropes and it is a nylon and it is a twisted or laid rope as opposed to the modern Kern Mantle construction or a braided rope like Dyneema or like Amskill rather. So it's twisted? It's twisted. So do you think it's going to get all untwisty as we pull it? Yeah we were doing some research on this and there was a comment from an old school valley climber about jugging up these and how he's still not able to walk straight because he kept on spinning. All right well what we're going to do is put it in our slack snap machine here which is a 20 foot long rectangle with a 20 to 1 pulley system and we've got two dynamometers here and we pull it. These pulleys move that way. Those pulleys are fixed in a Costco winch. So we're going to brake test it. As I'm sure you can see I've got paint all over my hands. I only have an hour before I have to go do my next thing after getting off of work. Even Bobby helped me today. He's got paint in his hair. Sorry buddy. So no I'm not making a living off of YouTube clearly or I wouldn't be painting. This is all donation based. I make 200 or 300 bucks off ads but I spend about 1500 a month on the channel. I really appreciate when you can donate gear like Hunter has or PayPal donations really helps a lot too. That actually pays the bills. This is just kind of fun. Make sure you go to hownotohighline.com. I am currently working every night on the Highlining 102 course. How to Rig Highline Anchors and you get to watch live. Every page I finish I post. So it's kind of like a follow along thing and you can leave comments on the course if you have something's unclear or you think information is not right. There's a lot of stuff on the website. We just finished slackline group so you can find 1400 slackliners all over the world and it's an interactive map. Super cool coming out with other stuff too. Give me your email on the website in order to be updated when we do release more resources. I only spam you when I've got things to keep you smart. Bobby's almost ready for us to break test but until then I started a coffee business with my friends. It is instant coffee. You just add this into hot water and you can take it camping, RVing or just drink it at home. Super simple. Go to drinkjunocoffee.com and it does directly help support this channel. You ready Bobby? So this is the shorter sample that he sent us. He said this was on a trade route or it got a lot of use. The main use would have been it would have been fixed around a boulder and then people would either use it as a hand line but most likely repel on it with a figure eight or a rack. Cool let's stick it on the machine. Let's start pulling. Oh look at the dust. One strand broke before the others. Yeah you can see it kind of oh yeah messing with its own braid here. These are kind of like welded together. Okay 12.8 kilonewtons. So I have tested dynamic rope before at 15 kilonewtons. 2750 pounds of force. All right so this is a 12 millimeter rope and a lot of stuff we climb in today is between 8 and 10 millimeters. So you get around the same value as you would with another old rope like this for example except it's a bigger diameter. It's a third the age. It's a third the age is also like a smaller diameter too but these would probably break around the same. Would you whip Brian? I would whip. Let's do it two more times. So while Bobby was resetting, being the helpful guy I am, I checked my mail and I got this. Past the Peton Pete sent me his new big wall book and yes I paid for this. I just really think this is cool so I thought I'd share it with all of you. Sick. Now I can learn all about hooking up. This is approved by Dr. Peton. Cool. I've actually climbed El Capitan about a thousand feet away while he was climbing El Capitan one time watching him fall all the way up. That's a nice book. Cool. Anyways if I remember I'll put the link in the description on how you can buy your copy of this book. It's I think I paid like 60 something bucks for it but you can see it's a pretty special book that has a lot of photos in it. Wow. So cool. Yeah breathe deeply Bobby. Oh that's nasty dust. Cool. That is so cool. You can just unravel the whole well it's a little welded together but that's that's neat. Okay show the numbers Ryan. Everyone wants to know what it broke at. Wow that's pretty cool. I'd whip on that. 13.8. Man that thing's like 20 years older than I am. You know something that's not in print? Highline University. We have our highline courses on there that you can learn A to Z everything about highlining and it's a free pdf on the website. Anyways we're going to do a third break test on this so we you know three is ideally more scientific even though this is mostly entertainment and I try to steer away from being into the science realm. Then we're going to break the rope that's not as used as much. Dang man look at all this. All right yep looks like a broken rope. 10.35. We got quite a range. That was the lowest one yet 2,250 pounds. So this is the rope that was pulled off of an area that wasn't used nearly as often. This wasn't taped near the end for a while. It just kind of unravels and it's just kind of been this way but yeah this thing's just got a bunch of cave dirt on it. You can see it's all over the place and let's find out if this retained a higher strength because it wasn't used as often. Man look at our pulleys. Okay so this what's interesting about knots is they don't stay dressed when you're pulling one strand as hard as we are. That doesn't look like the part that broke or does it? Wow so that's all the fibers. You can see the fresh breaks that happen that don't have mud on them. It's kind of a it's potentially a really cool thumbnail and that's the other side of this. Yeah it's a little bit a little bit warm and we got 11.15 kilonewtons or 2,350 pounds of force. All right so it broke in the knot on this side. The first time it's broken on this side and then things flew this way at 12.1 kilonewtons and it slightly unravels. It's kind of welded to itself because of the force that was on it. 12.1 or 2,650 pounds is pretty good. Let's do one more. Look at our test bed. Look at the number. It did not break in that knot. You can yeah yeah same old same old. This is not twisting like we thought it was uh going to. Untwisting. Untwisting. It's it's you know it's kind of a bearer and to tie these knots. It really sucks. It's really stiff but it's super abrasion resistant when we cut off each segment in order to test the next thing. So that's our lowest one so far 9.85 kilonewtons or 2,150 pounds of force. This is all going to go on the slack snap chart on the website which has all the videos of correlated with each break test so check it out to see all the stuff we haven't published yet but this of course will be on there as well. Our lowest result was our last test at 9.8 and our highest result was 13.8 so super good enough. A little disclaimer we actually don't care if you get hurt in a cave. I know I'm supposed to say that I care but mostly if you don't know what you're doing don't go into caves and damage something that took a very long time to make. Please go with someone who knows what they're doing and knows how to preserve the cave that you're going in. Ideally you shouldn't get hurt but if you did you're probably an idiot. Anyways not feeling very sensitive right now. I'm pretty tired. Thank you Hunter Campbell for donating this rope. It's pretty hard to know the exact history of a rope but it's good to know that even a 50 plus year old rope is breaking super good enough but ropes can break therefore you shouldn't go caving.