Why Figure 8 knot is NOT hard to untie!

What people said

imurray · 2022-08 · Strong recommendation

This is a great video. A summary for those who don't want to wade through it: The main message is that if the knot is slightly loose, or messy, the strands pinch unevenly in a fall, and it can be really hard to untie (depending on the rope). Most of the video is experiments to show that. The knot only had to be slightly loose to cause problems. The part that surprised me is that there are two different ways to tie the knot that basically look the same. They only differ in which of the two outgoing strands is the one that's loaded. They're both perfectly safe, but one can be a lot harder to untie than the other after a fall. I actually find it hard to end up with the "wrong" version of the knot, but I might just be lucky with what my muscle memory has latched on to. I certainly wasn't taught to watch out for the difference. The difference between the two knots is shown at 13m 24s: [VIDEO] His demo of one way to get the knot the right way around is at 7m 41s of another long video: [LINK]

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roessland · 2021-03 · Recommendation

Apparently there is a wrong way of tying a figure 8, that leads to a version that is much harder to untie. Personally I've never had issues untying a figure 8, so it might just be that my default way of tying it happened to be the correct way. It's described in this video: [VIDEO] Skip to 13:20 for the interesting part.

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panzerklein · 2022-08 · Reference

Figure 8 knot is not that hard to untie after a fall, you just have to tie it in a particular way [1]. [1] [VIDEO]

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