Aren't knots free?

What do you have there? This is a termination plate. What does it do? Instead of tying a knot in your rope for free, you can spend $50 on my metal stick here. And you can zigzag your rope through here instead. Why wouldn't I just tie a knot? Because some people think some people are dumb and they say this might be easier. What if I already know how to tie a knot? Knots reduce the strength of your rope and this will retain more strength. How much more strength? Shut up and stop asking questions. It will retain more strength. Now, what are the benefits of using a termination plate versus just tying a knot? A termination plate helps to maintain your rope's strength and offers consistent termination when factory terminations aren't enough. Okay, so we're better at breaking stuff than we are at skits. We really couldn't find how much more strength these retained. All we found out is knots reduce the strength of ropes and then they try to sell you the stick. Typical climbing knots can reduce the strength of a lifeline by as much as 50%. These are made by Climtech. It seems like there's a lot of very similar products that are just different colors, but other than that, same specs, same characteristics, same ratings, same look. Only a different color with each brand. Yeah. Read and follow the manufacturer's instructions. Tried to do that. Couldn't find the ones from Climtech. I did find some from other companies and they are just a hodgepodge of different certifications that when you look them up, they're not really relevant and they refer you to another certification, which is also not relevant, which refers you to another certification. The most useful thing I found was they said you're supposed to reave it a certain way, which there's also a handy diagram right here. So this thing is rated and certified for 11 to 19 millimeter ropes, which is massive, at least to a climber, that's massive. For recreational use, you hardly ever see those, but you do in professions like arborists or rope access. In order to know if this is actually retaining more strength, we are going to test the ropes we're going to test today on a big round bollard so we can maintain the full strength of the rope, tied in a figure eight to see how much that reduces these ropes and then put in this plate to see if it's somewhere in between the two. Rumor has it this thing will retain full strength. Some people said 90%. I'm always skeptical when I hear numbers like that. And I have friends that are using this for a nine millimeter rope. And just for funsies, we're going to test a six millimeter rope in here to see when it slips. So we're going to fully explore this device so we never really have to come back to it again. So this is a 12 millimeter rope. It is well used, which is why we want to establish what we are getting around the bollard without any knots in the system. And in all three tests, we got very consistent results around 22 kilometers. So it broke in the back of the bollard, back there. And what it looks like is a broken rope. So this is one of our most common knots here at HowNotTo. It's called a knife knot. Oh yeah? So our next three tests were figure eight to figure eight. Now let's see if the bends in the bringing plate are as bad for the rope as the knot. Is that easier than tying a knot? It really isn't, especially with this thick cord, which is on the lower end for this side of the plate. Could you imagine a 19 mil? Yeah. So that's our diagram up there. Tell me how I did. Called it 18. So it broke at the first bend, just like a knot. We were told these are easier to untie than a knot after a big load has been applied. Let's see. How big of a load, Bobby? I don't think they were putting almost breaking loads on them. This is definitely in the category of requiring a knife. If you don't cut the plate, you could damage it. How many cuts is it going to take? Let's see. Oh, it's pinched. Wow. Gotta relax your rope. So instead of 70% strength in a figure 8, we got 80% strength. Wow. If you're a safety margin, or if you're meeting standards barely, maybe just grab a bigger rope. So this works great if you're terminating the end of your rope. Get it? But if you want to terminate the middle of your rope, then that is going to require you to feed the entire rope through all these holes. And that, my friend said, who does it, he just kind of leaves it on there because it's such a pain in the ass because he's rigging the same thing over and over. That friend is Rope Swing Moab. If you want to do some rope swings in Moab, hit them up. But they use four termination plates with each rope that rigs the horizontal part of the rope swing into a termination plate because they're using a 9.2 Inlay Canyon Nero rope. Each one of these termination plates goes to a different bolt, and then they back, back, back it up. But if you're paying attention earlier, you're going to be like, ooh, that's out of spec because this only goes down to 11 mil. So we're going to find out how safe-ish he is. Really consistent. So this is really interesting that we were getting the same full strength out of the 9.2 rope as the 12mm rope, and then getting almost what we got out of Figure 8 with the same stuff. The 12mm was nylon, and this, polyester. And usually polyester or low-stretch materials will not take the bends in a knot very well. But we're going to find out if we're going to get that 18 kN range with the rigging plate. What my theory is, we're actually going to get slightly higher because this is going to reduce those bends this hates so much. Two things we're trying to find out. Does it hold because it's not built for that? And does it retain more strength than it did with that 12mm? Let's see how hard this is to untie. This is a much stiffer rope, which means I can push it through there. And... Yeah. You could not do that with a knot in this rope. Even though we got a lower result in a knot with this compared to the 12mm, the rigging plate gave us almost the same result. So that's kind of neat how this does help, but it doesn't give you 90% like some people thought. But a really cool rigging technique that Taylor at Rope Swing Moab uses is he will put one of those four ropes in one rigging plate attached to one bolt. And instead of rigging an anchor, he has one on each bolt. Super equalized enough. Super redundant. It's a pretty damn bomber. Especially if the horizontal's maybe seeing 6, 8 at the most kilonewtons. And almost every single line is a 3 to 1 safety ratio. What he likes about doing that is after a bunch of jumps, it'll start to get sagging. He wants to tension it back up. And instead of having a fused knot that he has to untie, it's very easy for him to, after tensioning, re-rig this thing a little tighter. So now we're going to test 6mm accessory cord. Not that anybody's really doing that, I don't think. Please tell me if you are. I want to see if this thing slips because the rope diameter may matter. It may not. It may not if you put a bite in it. It may not if you wrap it more. I just kind of want to see how this functions as opposed to more than the strength of the 6mm itself. Oh, it's slipping! Oh no, you're dead! Wow, that's actually not that high of a force. Who knew if you went super far out of specifications, it doesn't work properly. Now one idea is you can take a bite of rope, which actually makes it so you can terminate your rope wherever you want, just like you can with a knot. And we can thread this in on a bite and see if that increased surface area is enough to not allow it to slip. I ran out of throw on my piston. Well, I don't know. Is that a decent enough force? So now we're going to try this bite super wrapped. I went under, over, under, over, under every way I could. Alright, 7.7. I'm just curious what a figure 8 does. For the hassles this creates to even make it work, I don't think it's worth it over just tying a knot. This is Dyneema. This is a very slippery surface. It's got the same coefficient as Teflon. And you're not supposed to tie knots in it, so we're going to find out if doing the bite super wrap method is going to slip in this orientation. This has some applications to about three people on Earth, but it's still fun to know. It held! That's pretty impressive. It pinched it, but it seems to be just fine, especially when you wiggle it out. So now you're not supposed to tie knots in this, but this is how not to. So we are going to test that now. The plates gave us three more kilonewtons than the knot, so I don't know if you... If you need three extra kilonewtons, you should upsize your Dyneema. And that is never, ever coming undone. Have you ever seen these before? Do you use them? And what would you use them for now that you know about them after watching this video? We are not recommending that you use these out of the spec diameter they're intended for, but after our very few samples, you might see what might happen if you did use a smaller diameter in a hypothetical situation only. What's funny is when people think they're going to get 90%, my favorite, 99%, strength out of a rope using it on anything other than something very big and round. I don't know if ExtremeGear.org sells termination plates. They sell just about everything else, and 10% supports this channel. Now, if you are curious what a repel device might do to your rope, you can go check out this video next.