4mm Soft Shackle Connections for Highlines?!?!?! Full Highline Tutorial

This is about the same size as my shoelace. This is four millimeter Amsteel and we're making soft shackles out of them. So we can connect sewn loops together. If you're into segmented highlines, you'll like this episode. If you're not, we have 346 other episodes for you. So we are going to take soft shackles, we're gonna connect two loops together, not of the same piece of webbing, otherwise that makes a circle, but we're gonna go around twice and we're gonna go around the button nut. We are gonna bury the tails, we're in the middle of making them, so please don't leave nasty comments below. Or do, it's good for the algorithm. And this button knot is, people say I say button weird, I don't know what they're talking about. This is much smaller than a five millimeter soft shackle. And you can get the loops super close together instead of having to step over a segment awkwardly. So we're going to find out if this is super strong enough by risking our lives on a 156 meter, 152 meter highline. And then we're gonna go test it in the lab. So what do you think of this? Are you gonna go first for us? Absolutely, yeah. Yeah? I'm gonna whip on the thing. Okay. Oh yeah. And what do you think of this? I think it's gonna be okay. Yeah? I think it's gonna be okay, I trust it. Yeah? How do you know you trust it? Do you trust it? Don't know yet, but it should be pretty bomber I think. All right. I'm just ground support. Hi, I'm Ryan Jinks. And welcome to a segmented highline video. Your favorite according to the analytics. But no, this will really, really help people who bring big highlines, which is like these guys here. This is a five millimeter soft shackle. You can see the button knot. And we're actually finishing up the four mils. So I'm gonna have Cheryl show you a quick version of the button knot. You can go to this video right here. If you wanna see the long version of how to tie a button knot, which preserves up to 225% of the strength of your soft shackle, which is important when you're using shoelaces. Yep. Over the shoulder view, way better. All right. So that's the second stage. She's doing the third stage. We're gonna find out if you screw up any of these stages. If you die, we'll be testing that later this year. Then you gotta stick those down the crown, which was made in stage two. You got the opposite side. You nailed it. That's awesome. And then you try not to screw it up and cinch it down. Turns into the shape of a button. Button. You guys say button. How do you say button? It's a button. Do you say it like killing Newton? I like to add a T to every word that, you know, I say wrong. So after we tie the button knot, we have to bury the tail, which is this thing coming out here. So I put this stick all the way through. It comes out right below the head and I tape the stick and the anseal in line with each other. If you overlap it, it's gonna be too thick. And you go like that. You do some twisty twisties and you bury it. Now, tapering, I have not found to be super important. Burying it is important. If you can, if you really care about your little soft shackles and you're not trying to do this and get done with your highline, then you could taper. Tapering is where you cut a few strands, cut a few so it's tapered, hence the name. And then you take that hollow, it's a hollow braid core in case you're wondering. And that's how you make soft shackles. So then you go around the head like that and it does not, believe it or not, come off. So when we double wrap it and go through both loops, it's going to make it, in theory, twice as strong, which is what we need because it's not that strong. And then we take that head and we bury it inside of the loop. So the loops end up being as close as my knuckles are. All right, so we're gonna tape the highline together now and then we're done waterlining, practicing. We have a different couple lengths here because we're kind of making this up as we go. So the finished length open is anywhere between 12 inches. And what does that look like, eight inches? So let's find out how it feels on the webbing. From my chest out, it was too long. And so somewhere between this length and less. But it's all just a test, just make one, test it. But this stuff's pretty cheap, 4mm steel. And these, I just don't imagine these costing, if this was four feet of 40 cents each. It's pretty cheap. These are 5mm soft shackles. And this is what we do the backup with. You never just connect backups and mains. You want it all interconnected. And these are, well, let's have a tape measure. So these are 22 inches open. So let's connect mains and then let's connect all four loops with these. And I'll show you what tape I like the best. So Steve and Cheryl have already taped. They put, let's see here. You put electric tape on the outside, right? Fiber tape on the inside. You need to untape the fiber tape. It has a tab right here, so you're not trying to pick that apart. And that is all pre-taped, we're just doing the segments. So the backup webbing is Spider Silk 3. I'm very excited about getting my hands on this. This is a Vectron Dyneema blend, if I'm not mistaken. And this is green from Balance Community. And that is a polyester. No, this is a nylon. Blue is the polyester. And their backup extenders is webbing and not Amsteel extenders. This is honestly way nicer to not have anything around when it flips over the main. So they've already taken a five millimeter soft shackle and taped the backup to the extender. Because if you have a 50 meter backup and a 50 meter main, they'd be the same length and we want backup loops. You could, I guess, use a four mil at this point too, in the future, I just realized that. This is basically the main and backup and main and backup. So now we're gonna over the shoulder film me attaching this. Okay, so the green webbing is our main webbing. And we are going to connect, never use carabiners in a highline rig, at least not in the webbing. So this is our backup, this is our main. We wanna connect our main first. We're gonna go in the main. And it's very important to double wrap four millimeter because this is only gonna be strong enough if it's double wrapped. The loop and the head have to go over each other, which is gonna be tough, but rewarding. That means our loops are gonna be really close to each other and that would be really hard to come off. Take that head, make sure that noose is over the button nut, rotate it so it's inside of one of the loops, just like that. And now we're going to tape it. So white electric tape is actually what leads to the least amount of glue residue. So if you actually put this on first and then the skinny fiber tape on top, then over several years of leaving it on here, in theory, you won't have any glue residue. But that's why I'm gonna put this here. And I don't need to necessarily inspect this. As nice as it would be to be able to see it, you can kind of feel if it's doing what it needs to. And once you're out there, you're already on the highline. So that's awesome. That is awesome. That ring is just gonna slip right over there. Yeah. That's great. Because the E-nub splits are like this far apart. And you can see in the video right here where we do that segment. Now I would be inclined to just tape a little farther up, but maybe not. We don't want to tape yet in here because we have to do what I call the W. And so what you do is that's gonna be underneath. And what I want is these backup loops to be set back away from these main loops. So you don't have this big fat sandwich that you're trying to get the ring to go over. So pick whatever direction you're gonna go. And then you go the opposite way each way, like you're weaving something. Then towards me. And then away from me. And then it's gonna go underneath. And then towards me. And you want to make sure that you're, well, a one half twist in your backup is not gonna actually be that big of a deal. And you can actually make these even longer if you wanted to. So you pull them apart. And if this were to break, let's say this side broke, you now have it connected. Or you have this connected, or you have the backup connected, or you have the main connected. So this is what we'd like to have in high lining redundancy. Now, the button knot, we want to hide inside of one of the loops. So I'm going to secure that first with electric tape. And this is where the climbing tape's really nice. SK75, go to marine.com, is the kind that doesn't have the lower creep, which doesn't matter when it's short soft shackle. Otherwise, creep is gonna happen if you use this for, I don't know, like a 900 meter zip line, hypothetically. So you tape the throat right here, and it's not gonna come off. This is really sticky. If you left this on here for a while, you would have glue residue, but we're not. We are taking this apart, or it's gonna be in a bag after one day of high lining. I'm gonna tape that knot, that button knot inside of this loop. I want it to stay put. Now, if I tape this like a mummy, it's going to want to have a twist in it. So I want to be careful not to pull super hard with my electric tape. And I'm not doing slider tapes. I'm just literally meshing the two together exactly where they're at. Now, if you're gonna go rope swinging, and you want to be able to connect inside of these two loops to stabilize a ring, which is also old technology with our new 2022 version coming out in 2022, you can just tape over this so you leave them exposed. So like that honestly is enough. Cause sometimes it's nice to be able to clip to these loops with, it's just, I don't want that sticky part sticking out because we're gonna try to slide rings and stuff over that. That flopping is fine. This, I want to be as far away from this loop, that loop. If any of this is confusing to you, please don't highline on your own. That is gorgeous. Even on our Sweden project, people had a hard, cause we had an ENOV split. So the gap's this big. It's got this thing here. It's an ENOV split, since we're just going to cover it real quick, is you go in through itself and then over the top and you have this figure eight shape, which is great if you're trying to make this redundant system. That's your two loops, the Cheryl's hands. And then you'd go down both sides. Instant replay. Down both sides, down both sides. You go down both sides and then connect your backup loops. So if the mains fail, but I actually think this is more redundant because if this fails in an ENOV split, you're dead. Whereas if this fails, you're still all fours connected individually. But if you're trying to step over an ENOV split, it wants to roll under your feet and this is going to stay flat. See when I hold the two up, they don't have this weird twist from the, what I call mummification. What do you got there? Got a four mil soft shackle, triple, triple wrapped through. Triple wrap looks a little thick. Definitely bomber, but this was our longer one. So this was our solution, but you can see how close those are. And that's so nice. Let me just put a quick four on it. Is that four, four pounds? Kind of like three and a half K. I think she'll whip. So you can see how fat this five mil is. That's a five mil, but not inside. And then how this is less. So I don't think I would do this with double four mil. I like the five mil down here. So if I was doing a serious project, I guess anytime you tie into a highline, it's serious. If I was doing like a 2K and there's 30 people involved and it's like a serious, serious project, what you could do is get like a whiteboard with a dry eraser and put the segments together. And before you put tape on it, you write the number of segment that it is and take a photo of each part of it and just throw the whole thing in like a Google drive folder. So everyone can inspect that you connected the soft shackles correctly. And everyone can just kind of glance through them real quick and see that they all look good. And if something looks a little funky, each one of these would have a number written right here as a double check system. Otherwise you're just trusting that somebody didn't screw up 40 connections or 80 connections. Technically there's two each, but I think this is super great. We're gonna put it back in the bag and we're gonna go highline. Trying, I want everybody to see how much fun we're having. I'm in Northern Calgary right now and we're gonna rig a highline. I think from a spot over there to where I'm standing in this beautiful gorge, somehow nobody's playing in on a weekend here in Calgary. So let's set this thing up and see if we're gonna live with our untested segmented technology. This is a good spot for a highline failure. Yeah, cause like no one would see us, like we could just delete the video if it went wrong. Exactly, and no one would know, no one would know this location. Calgary search and rescue. If you do, you probably wouldn't get rescued. That's the problem. All right, Jules is walking the tagline over to right there. Henry's holding it, playing with his walkie talkie. And I just tied a BFK. We have our soft release and this is gonna be the webbing. This is the static side because that side actually has a place to stand and tension and do all the stuff we're gonna do. This is just through one, two and three quick links. This is just the tail. This is a tailless BFK where there's no knot terminating the two ends. And it just kind of chills here. So you can check out all of our highline videos in the playlist, but this is pretty much where it's gonna go. We'll put a haul bag under this and then wrap the whole thing with Tree Pro. So this will be super padded. Abrasions are number one risk. All right. Yeah. You hoo. Just why you don't want it wrapped around your leg. Okay. So we have the bulk of it in the bag over here because we're gonna take the webbing over there and pull the webbing to the static side just because we want all the extra webbing on that side because we're gonna tension and pull the webbing this way. We're gonna pull the tagline this way. So we've thought about what side we want all that on. So now let's go over there. Okay. So we just wrapped three boulders on the side. This side did not need bolts. So we made each rock. It's own span set. We'll show you that in a minute. And just like you would do three bolts, you got this rope going through doing the W here. This rope goes that way. This rope goes the other way. We got lots of videos on BFKs, tailless BFKs. Tailless BFKs have big tails. Ironic. So I want to do an overhand because I wanna keep the eye really big. I wanna put a lot of stuff in here. Now I'm not tightening this very much because if it wants to go left or right, it can just do that automatically. If any one of these span sets go, the other ones stay where they're at. Let me show you the span sets. Okay. So we very simply wrapped a span set around this boulder, extended it with a girth hitched span set for point number one. Point number two is also very simply looped around this boulder. And we just added a knot in order for it to be a little shorter. This last one is what we call a scorpion hitch. And it is where we put the girth hitch on the backside and it wraps around this way and that way. The reason it's different colors is we extended it. And then the tail of the scorpion comes over the rock, but it was over too far. And we have this adjustable sling method, which we have another video right here on that. And then we just have our BFK, just like you would have on bolts, just like we did over there. Now what? Definitely want to pat it. All right. Soft shackle holding line scale two, holding the selectivity seahorse. And that is a great note. I bet you never forget the ring. Oh no, never. We put the biggest carabiner we have right here at the pin. And we already checked that the green and blue are, the green and backup are correct. And so that's going to have all the pressure on this carabiner, which we put a swivel on in case this has twists in it. Hanging underneath separately, we have the leash so it can't twist once we have this is established the way we want. We don't want this crisscross if we don't need to. We want as smooth as possible. So all I have to do is once they take this peg line and start pulling it, which they're going to have a micro traction and they don't really have to hold the weight. You never want anybody to have to be like holding it, especially near an edge on their side. So I'm going to hang on to it like this and I'm going to feed it out. And I'm going to try when I get to the tape, I'm going to try to keep it nice and flat, keep my fingers in between the two and feed it out as much as I can. A little extra on the backup, little extra on the backup like that. And I would keep feeding it out. That's all there is to it. Super simple. Okay, so here is the ultimate test. Let's pull that through. Yeah. So anyways, I'm glad I have the redirect. I don't think I could do this without the redirect. We're pulling smooth and good enough, but we got everybody keeping it off the rocks. It's nice to have more hands, but the redirect, I could also sling a rock, not at this point, but I could sling a rock down here and have one more Z-drag, which gives like ultimate control. But this is only 150 meters. You can get away with this. At 300 meters, it's nice to have a second one. And gloves. So we're trying an experiment. We're using the Infinity, which we have videos on that, of course. And you have to put in the end of the webbing, which wasn't that far into the bag. And we had to take the tape off, but we knew we were going to pull out 50 meters of this, because there's four 50 meter segments and we only have 150 meter line. 152. So we have to switch this out for a pulley system as soon as we get the segment right here that we made. Basically hand tension at the forces that we can hold is in that 0.2, 0.3 range. We still got our BFK doing BFK things. Looks like our Scorpion wants to move around. That's nice and solid. And this will get tight as this tightens up here. This is annoying at the beginning, but right now I'm loving it. Because we're going to get it all the way to the segment and then we're going to transfer it to the pulley system that Jules is setting up. Just grab it, transfer it to the web wire. This is even better for even longer lines. The problem is every segment, you got to reset this up. And every segment has sewing loops. And this isn't that great for sewing loops. I'm not saying you should buy it. I'm just saying the link's in the description below. So this, I cranked it down to three and it's already at two and a half. Maybe not while I'm on it, but this is nylon. Nylon likes to settle and stretch. And so I kind of want to get all that out and get all the tension that I want while our Crank-O-Meter is still installed because I only want to use the rad pulleys to just transfer the weight to the web lock. So let me carefully not have that whip up into my face. That is possible. What do we got here? Line scale three is 50 hours of running continuous time coming near, store near you soon. Wow, 2.3 already. So it just, it goes down a lot. So maybe when this, we'll get it to three, we'll play with it for a little bit. And then these are the rad BLNC pulleys. So it's a five to one, super lightweight. None of this is cheap. If you're looking for cheap, you buy one of these. All this will be in the description below. And you just use your hangover. Not the one you got last night, but the one you carry on your harness. And you connect the two and you can just do three to ones with your friends until you get to this point. Then you just top it off with a pulley system of your choice which could be three of these. We got a whole video right here for that. Okay, so this is like the way, the same as a web lock, the way the webbing goes in and out. I'm gonna pull this pin now that I'm not on it anymore. You don't get on the webbing without the webbing locked off. Yeah, cool. So now that that's off, I'm going to crank this. And we also had the backup frost knotted to the master point just in case something went wrong. Here, it's pretty easy. Just take it back up to three. And in theory, we really could leave this in the rig. Now, these are not approved for high lining because I don't know what kind of standards you'd have to pass to get that approved. But if you're in a long line with this in the park at six or eight kilonewtons, long, long lines, I feel like this would be super safe enough. However, you don't want to just have, you want to back this up in case something flies. You don't want metal flying at you, even in the park. Literally, people have died from hardware coming off of this part and flying and hitting them in the head. It's not that dangerous of a sport if nothing goes wrong. We were at 2.5, but now we're taking all the load onto these pulleys and off of this whole system. And I think we're at what, three and a half? So I want to open up this thingy and have a Z-drag. Z-drags are awesome. And then I'm going to engage that lock again and scoot this back. Let's just do that and that. Sick. Wood whip. Who's first? Okay, 3.16. Okay, now you can get on. Check this out. This is so cool. The loop fits magically to here. So we didn't have to do knots. This is full strength now. And yeah, cleaning up the webbing. We just pulled it through the infinity. It's kind of a pain with padded loops, but we'll tie off this tail now that she's done with that. We're going to go sesh. The segments when I was walking felt fantastic. Didn't feel like it was going to roll. The loop so close together felt great. Except I was scared and it's hard. That's why I fell. Here's the segment. Super nice and tight. Looking great. I'll just show you this rigging for fun. This is our shorter highline that they set up while we were doing the bigger one. We have some, I think, fixed gluons here in our equilateral triangle. So this back leg here is seen roughly the same force these side ones are seen. And then the backpack and the padding. And then the, let's see here, the frost knot backup, soft release. And that's, that pin is closed. There's just things you can check to make sure there's carabiners that aren't open. This is just a quick bit back. So you have a, the tail is tied off. Frost knot on the soft shackle. But yeah, sometimes if it's opened up here, you can identify it. But we're also not the first person to be on this. So let's have some fun. Highline something that's in my realm of possibilities and enjoy it. How many friends do you got? Friends? I think I got six here. What, four up here? And then like six in the crack. Oh boy. Man, that does make you look old when you're repelling off of friends, man. But they work. You can see that in the video right here. All right, see you at the bottom then. Yeah, highliners are like so worried about padding all their stuff. And then climbers, they just rub their ropes all over the place. Steve is exploring a new climb and Cheryl is filming him. Now we're gonna de-rig. I'm gonna show you how we're gonna do it easily. So we put all the weight onto the tagline, remove the soft release. We unravel it and then send everything over and they're gonna drop the tagline and we're gonna bring it back. So this is the backup and I took it off of the master point here and I clipped it through this loop direct because this is gonna be spinning through here as we unravel it. And I didn't want this carabiner to be clipped to this. This is an auto triple locker so I'm not worried about that gate opening. And it's clipped to this. And we extended the anchor with just the end of the tail here. So this is tight from behind me. And I'm gonna hang onto this, or Cheryl's gonna hang onto this while she unravels the soft release. The soft release is on what we call the static side, we did not tension from here. And the sewn loop is right here. So when it completely is unraveled and it extends out further and more and more, it's just gonna fall and be on our side. So the only thing that's going over there is this, this, and of course this carabiner. And then they're gonna pull in as soon as we have slack. Now, I've got a couple inches here before this is gonna get tight. And by releasing this out just one or two feet, it's gonna reduce it down to at least 1.5 kilonewtons. Right now it's 2.5. So this is plenty strong enough. Even this polypropylene cheap tagline rope, this is eight millimeter. This will break around two, three, or four kilonewtons, I forget. And it's super good enough for this method. If it feels a little tight, I can just let some out while this is being unraveled more and more until this takes all the weight. That's why this does not have to be very long. Six wraps with this. And you just need enough tail to have two or three half hitches here with the tail right here. You don't need more than that. If you really wanna feel secure, you can tie this off. But you don't need the tail to be long enough to extend it out somewhere so they can undo that and then send it back towards what, us? That seems inefficient. We have a whole video right here about that. So we're gonna just show you that process again, just so you got the whole full derig rig process. You ready to do it? And we got our whole bag right there. And this is our extender that we made that we're Z-dragging. I didn't wanna run it over these rocks. Let's do it. So I have a backup here in case it starts to go, I can hang on to it, hang on to Munter. Yeah, it's just an unraveling thing. Hang on. Don't pull backwards, you gotta pull forwards. Go towards them. If your hand's tight, I have it. If you wanna let go, let go. So I'm just gonna go slow. Once the pressure's off, you can see that the soft release is attached here and it's coming off of this part. Now this is a really cheap rope, so it's okay if it rubs a little, that's what tag lines are designed for. Careful of your hands, your hands are more important. I feel so much less pressure already. Like it just doesn't feel hard anymore. So that was a lot to cover in one episode. I'm going to do the break test in an entirely different episode because it ended up being a rabbit trail. First of all, you can start with 43 inches for the four millimeter Amsteel. And by the time you're done tying the button knot, you want it about eight and a half inches in order for it to be just tight enough to keep the loops together, but not so tight, it's difficult to put it on. We used SK-75 from gotomarine.com in this video and we broke the button knot and broke test it from anywhere from 34 to 49 kilonewtons. Very interesting why there's such a huge discrepancy there. It's definitely super strong enough, but in order to have even stronger, there's SK-99 Max at Cave Exploration Society and that is still cheap enough to be bomber. And I'm estimating a 68 kilonewton in BS on a double wrap four millimeter soft shackle. And because of that, don't do this until I test it, I'm considering doing triple wrapped three millimeter. The head is what we're trying to get rid of. The head is the bulkiest part when you're walking over this stuff. But please subscribe if you do segmented highlines and make sure you hit the bell notification so you keep up with these updated ways to connect segmented highlines. And I just found out Balance Community has an adjustable backup extender. And that could be really nice in case you have different mains or even if they're the main stretch is differently, different on temperature, humidity, and things like that. And over time, you can always just adjust a backup to have the exact perfect loops that you want. Even though we are breaking gear here for all extreme sports, I haven't forgot about highlining. I still love it. And I definitely want to hone in the best way to do segmented highlines. Thanks for watching. Cheers.