How strong are sail boat soft loops & snap shackles?

How strong is a boat? We're gonna find out. We got a tiny piece of a boat here. What are these called? Soft loops or soft pad eyes. Soft loops. It's the stuff you can clip to on a boat. Instead of a metal bolted down on top. Ah, pretty cool stuff. We're going to test this. We're going to show you how this is actually made and then we're going to pull on this sample and see how it goes. Yeah, we'll see what breaks. We'll see what breaks. Hi, I'm Ryan Jenks and this is David Liebenberg and he likes to sail a lot. So we're doing a how not to sail where we are breaking gear fear and hopefully not creating some gear fear. And we're gonna create an entire playlist for sailing related stuff. This being one of them. So you want to guide us through what you use these for. Yeah, so these are three different loops, one, two, and three. These two that go through, this is the deck of a boat essentially, are higher load. And then this little guy is sort of just an attachment so you can glue it on to the side of a composite structure, fiberglass or carbon fiber, without having to drill a hole and attach something to it. So cool. I don't know how strong this is. I want to find out. So that's just glued on. That's just glued on with epoxy. You're just hanging your hat on that. Yeah. What do you put in here? You put metal or the circle thing? Yeah, yeah. Sometimes a friction loop or a ferrule will go in here and then another rope can run through the metal that's in here to reduce friction and chafe. Or you could attach a block to it like a pulley. Gotcha. And have the rope, a separate rope, run through the pulley. So chafing is rope on rope abrasion. Yep. What we call And a block is what you call pulleys. Correct. Why don't you just call them pulleys? Because they're blocks. Okay, so you got circles under here. Yeah. So we can pull that out. Pull that out. How is that made? Yeah, so there's a few pieces. The rope portion is two pieces of Dyneema. So it's this Dyneema chafe cover, which is the outer bit that you see here. And inside of it, there is more Dyneema. The Dyneema inside is load bearing. And the Dyneema on the outside is for the chafe or just reducing wear over time. And why does the outside not see like tension as well? Because if that's seeing tension, isn't that the same? Yeah, it has to do with the angle of the weave on the outside and it's a little bit soft. So I'm going over this Dyneema here. So it's not 12 braided. It's not 12 braided. It's braided with a tube that's round so stuff can run through it and it just sits over the outside. It's like a finger trap on the outside. So if you squish it in, then when you pull it out again, it's not seeing any force. Exactly. The weave doesn't see force. So I can pull and that can still slide over it. Gotcha. And then you loosely secure the two ends and it gets held in place. Yeah, I guess that's better than using a thicker Dyneema. Than the 12 strand Dyneema. Correct. Yeah. Okay. You still got to protect it. You have to protect it. You have to protect it. But the weave is smaller, so it's better at chafe. When ropes are under tension, they can cut through a lot easier. It's good to know when you're climbing and highlining. Always pad your highlines, by the way. So this is not a knot embedded in this wafer. Correct. So it is effectively... We have this construction and then the two ends of it are, take a second, but splayed out. So it's like that. It's like that. It gets splayed out and there's two pieces of fiberglass plate with epoxy in the middle and it gets sandwiched together and the epoxy glues the loose ends of the Dyneema together and binds it to the two sides of the plate. That's pretty rad. How long has this been in production since Dyneema came around? That's a good question. 10 or 15 years maybe. How long has sailing been around? 12,000 years. So relatively new actually. So then you drill a hole in your boat. Is that a single hole? Because that sounds cheap. Is it supposed to be this difficult? You don't want to drill a bigger hole than you need. You didn't. It's going to go eventually. Sometimes we need another thing to pull it through and then you'd put some sort of silicone or sealant to keep the water from going into the boat as well when you finally install it. Nailed it. So we're going to attach this to our brake test machine and these are just going to be slow pulls. There's all sorts of loads that you see on a sailboat. Like a lot of this. Yeah, some shock loading sometimes. And then you got a tiny one. Yep. And then a glued on little one. I have no idea how we're going to get this in the slack snap machine. Figure that out. Let's give it a shot. All right. Oh, the Dyneema broke. Oh, it didn't. What did you think was going to happen? Or it might have pulled out. I was expecting the top fiberglass sheet to splinter a little bit. Well, it kind of broke at the bottom here. Yeah, but the Dyneema broke at the bottom. Fiberglass is intact. Fiberglass and epoxy for the win. Let's try the bigger one. Okay, we're set up for what we believe is two millimeter. Yeah, two mil inside the Dyneema chafe. Inside the chafe, yep. And how strong do you think this is going to be? 1500 pounds. All right, so about six kilonewtons here. You were wrong. Wow. So you're saying this doesn't need to be strong because the boat isn't. What this is attached to often needs to get reinforced anyways. Yeah, otherwise you'll pull a hole through your boat. Oh, well now we can see if this is actually two mil. I am so impressed. 14 kilonewtons. You could highline on that. So that's three mil. That's not two mil. Okay, good to know. And you can see the loose cover. Why does it look like that? Is it just because it's black or because we heated it up? No, it is black Dyneema. Oh, okay. Interesting. Dyneema cover actually broke. Here's a little bit of the Dyneema cover. And then the core was back down in there and it sort of seems like it broke right at the edge of the epoxy. These guys feel like they have a little epoxy on them. So you're saying I shouldn't stand next to the bigger test? I think that's probably wise. It looks like it broke in the same way. Here, you want to pull that out. Yeah, that's the chafe cover that's still in place. And the core, same as last time, pulled out from the inside. Wow. All right. Let's measure the diameter to just double, double check. Four mil. Four mil. Okay. And the other one was three? Slightly smaller than the soft shackles from our previous episode. Our previous episodes? Oh, we broke some soft shackles for you. Check that out. Here, as a bonus break test that's not related to this, but we have no idea where else to put this into a video, is, what is this? It's a snap shackle. It's a high load snap shackle. So I have a small one that I used on, shock loading is a myth and I pulled myself and released myself, but this is a bigger one. How strong is this one? 12,000 pounds. Yeah, that's more than I've ever, I have a tiny one. Are we going to break it or are we going to see if we can actually release the load under 5,000 pounds? Yeah, let's try it. So it's designed to be able to be released relatively easily under a high load. Okay. So I'd love to see what that looks like and then pull it and see if we can pop it. Okay, what's the mechanism of it? So there's a lever arm here and it catches right there. So that's holding everything. Yeah, so that's holding everything. So it's open, snaps closed. It's getting pulled here. You pull the lever arm and it opens up. And you were worried about this one because there's wear and tear right here. So this actually just sailed to Hawaii and you can sort of see some chafe right there. There's a metal ring that it went through. How many times was this used? Was it just the one trip or is this? It was used before, but then it was up under many thousands of pounds of load for multiple days on end with it constantly moving and settling. Every wave you hit, everything, the load changes a little bit. And what are you trying to snap shackle out there? It's called the spinnaker. It's like a big round sail in front of the boat. That's most of the time colorful. And there's a whole bunch of them that sort of triangulate. And when you change which spinnaker you have up, you need to be able to release that sail very quickly. So you go out and you'll spike and you put a metal wedge in it and it can pop like that. And you're standing next to that while you pop it. Doesn't that shit go flying? Well, some of the time you shimmy out over the water on the end of like a 15 foot pole over the water and you're holding yourself out there and then you spike it. Oh, so it makes it even safer. Oh yeah. So in this test, since we don't want to stand next to this, we're using this little string. Yeah. And you can have it sort of on a remote release as well. Wait, this isn't a little string. This is our leftovers from our soft shackle break test video found right here. It trips the, uh, okay. So we're pulling from a distance. We'll pull up to what's 5,000 pounds, 25 kilonewtons ish. Yep. All right. Let's put it at 25 and then release it. That just sounds really dangerous. It sounds like something I would like to do. We're like working with a grenade here. So, Oh, don't pull it. So that looks right. About 5,000 pounds of force on this right now. Do you think there's friction in it? Possibly. And what about this? What if you just like slowly pull it, but yeah, have your foot behind you. 220 pounds. Well, I'm impressed how strong you are, but that's not working. That's it's like that. Huh? Interesting. Yeah. That's, that's what I was just thinking. Like this was supposed to be a quick bonus test and now it's turning into a whole second half of an episode. Yeah. Uh, now what? Should I take it up to 15 kilonewtons to see if it's working? Yeah. Some of the time when we have it on a hair trigger, you're bow stringing. Tie it off and then we can just grab this and pull sideways is how that, that does function in the field. There's one. Open that up. All right. We're just going to keep testing this under, under 10. I feel like we're pretty good. We're at three. Go for three. Okay. That's almost 2000 pounds. Wait for it. And action. That wasn't too hard. Was it? No. I think the, uh, you think that extra force does it? Yeah. I think that does quite a bit. Let's take it up to 12 and see if you can do it from back there because that's apples for apples. We're at 12 kilonewtons. Go for it. Wow. You had to really work for that. That was at 12.25 when he released it. Do you want to try a bow string? Let's try a bow string. Okay. So we have five kilonewtons under here. This is the trigger attached to the end there, and he's going to pull this string back to give, you know, some advantage. Yeah. So, um, this tight office should be safe enough. 16, 22. What on earth happened? I broke my, uh, trip line. That's right here. Okay. So when is the 26 kilonewtons, you're not, you're not, you're not doing it without some weird thing. Mechanic, uh, metal spike metal spike would do it, but then you have to be right next. I was going to say, we want to do it here. Why would you do it on a boat to get done? Sometimes makes me want to go sailing. Yeah. So like, why do they make it this strong? If it's going to be that sketchy done, do it. So you have a safety factor because it's a T12 breaking strength, not a working load. Ah, what is the working load? It doesn't say. Oh, so we're loading to half. We're at what might be a max working load. If you have a safety factor, super max working load. Yeah. Safety factor too is not a lot. No. Um, should we just pull it till it break breaks? Let's do it. Something ended up behind us. I think something hit this. I mean, sometimes it's the machine bumping it, but Holy crap. Oh, the mechanism. Whoa. Oh, so the trigger didn't break. Here's the trigger. Yeah. That's the release. Okay. And it broke where it was worn at the, uh, at the pivot point. It definitely should be replaced because it broke only at 41 kilonewtons. Uh, I'm glad that's not on a boat anymore. What's the math on 41 kilonewtons. What's it rated to 12,000 pounds. We just broke it at 9,200 pounds science. Good thing it came off the boat. So what'd you say earlier that I thought was a really good comment. I'm learning that things don't have as much load as I think that's really the premise of how not to super good enough is kind of the conclusion, even though this did break lower than the MBS. It's also worn out, but at the end of the day, it's like you can't even release the thing at 5,000 pounds. So you're never going to use this thing over two or 3,000 pounds. I don't know. That was a sketchy. That sounded sketchy. Forgot. This was the original break test we started with. It's been a while since we started. So this was what four mil dyneema soft pad. I three mil dyneema soft pad. And what'd you just say about them? They're both way stronger than I thought they were. This is probably stronger than what I attach it to on the boat. Most of the time. It's a good point. It's not just strength though. It's abrasion or chafing. It's a lot of different factors. Uh, we try to think of things holistically here on the channel. And so if we zoom in on things like this, we're going to focus on just the strength of this, but it's not just the strength of that. Yeah. We've got a playlist for everything. Playlists are how we organize things. 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