Gro;g’s animated knots page shows you how to tie several dozen knots with simple, step-by-step animations. Knots are lovely things, making rope into something useful and potential if unlikely lifesavers. I pretty much hated most of the basic skills of Boy Scouts, but for some reason the knot tying part still gets me. (Although I can tie fairly complicated knots, I rarely can remember the most basic ones and when to use them. I guess learning them in a practical setting would be best.)
A friend’s boyfriend helped me load some lumber on the top of my old Chevy Blazer once. He jumped on top, whipped a length of rope around a couple of times and tied off the whole thing with a self-tightening loop rig that could be loosened by pulling another loop when I was ready to unload. That whole rig held for 2,000 miles until my truck died in Utah. I asked him where he learned to tie knots like that and he said his dad used to be a piano mover. Turns out the son of a piano mover is just as likely to learn how to move pianos than to learn how to play them.
Do any of you guys use knots in your work? I’m slightly sad to say I only use them occasionally to tie up a loop of CAT-5.
Animated Knots List [AnimatedKnots.com] (Thanks, Brett!)
I got a book on knots from Klutz (the same people who make the juggling kits) and a couple of other books but since I don’t use the knots all the time I can never remember them. One that I do remember is a fishing knot for when I take my kids fishing to tie the leader to the fishing line or it could be used to attach one line to another. It’s an over-hand not tied with the end of a leader’s line onto the fishing line, with a second overhand knot tied from the fishing line onto the leader. You pull them together to form a knot that ties one line to another.
I know the bowline is important but I don’t always remember it and the clove hitch (slipped) is supposed to be good. I could never tie the trucker’s hitch (which you can cinch down) and I never remember the sheepshank (for getting rid of extra slack in the rope.) The cool thing about the Klutz book is it came with a couple of pieces of rope and the book was a ‘board’ book where the pages were thick and had holes in them where you could practice tying the knots for each one.
I think the bowline was probably the best to learn because you could use it to haul somebody out of the water, you could tie together two ropes using two bowlines, one tied around the other, and I think it’s what was used to moor ships and you can easily untie it. The one thing the book suggests is that the overhand knot (the traditional knot everybody uses) shouldn’t be used in a lot of examples because it puts a lot of stress on the rope to tie and un-tie it and the book also suggested the square knot was over-rated and might be used to secure a load when it shouldn’t because if it was bumped it would come undone. A guy from work who had a couple of kids in scouting was really torqued that I suggested the square knot wasn’t the Holy Grail of knots and I never understood why.
There are knots for every purpose it seems. However, coming from a climber’s perspective the knots are only as important as the intended application. Which is to say no matter how well you can tie a quadruple-overhand-sheepshank-butterflyfly when what you needed was a prusik you’ll most likely wind up dead (this should not imply you won’t wind up just as dead if you tie the prusik wrong). Allez! Homard!
Boy Scouts represent!!! I always enjoyed knot tying but for whatever reason splicing always kicked my ass. This site however looks pretty sweet, much better than a few sketches and arrows attempting to indicate direction.
believe it or not, i do deal with knots quite a bit in my work - i’m a photographer. it’s the last thing i would have ever thought i’d need to know to do what i do, but there’s no denying it: knowing how to tie a strong slipknot accelerates you closer to being the shit in your off-hours.
I think all you really need to know is how to tie a clove hitch and a half hitch. A bowline or trucker’s hitch is handy, but I think the clove takes the cake. Once it’s tight, it’ll stay tight, and isn’t that what knots are for?
Sir,
please tell me if you know how to make an ARMY SHOULDER CORD AND FOURRAGERES. WHER CAN I BUY A BOOK THAT SHOW HOW TO MAKE THEM.
RESPECTIFULLY,
FRANCIS BETTS,SR.