As for Roo's assertion of jamming,
[ to wit: ]
I'm not at this point seeing the ease of tying an Ashley Loop, but that may come with time if it has good qualities (more on this next). But I would expect there would be more to remember, since there is more to remember in the corresponding bend. There's not just the geometry of the b and q, but also how they initially interlink.
On to testing, I find that the loop, like the bend, is prone to jamming. This may be mitigated by dressing a certain way, but this jamming tendency cannot thereby be ignored. Tyers will randomly arrive at both configurations (assuming that there are only two). Having a duality or multiplicity of stable knot forms for a single knot increases the odds that unfavorable attributes will arise and obviously increases the amount of investigation that must be done to ferret out the knot properties for all forms or shapes.
... that is simply not something I've found, if the knot is properly tied
to avoid that.
And such tying is pretty natural, IMO. E.g., I just loaded (w/body
weight and 5:1 pulley, so w/more than normal working load)
some 5/16" cheap ("Home Depot" is the common moniker)
kernmantle (multifilament polypropyline ?) that is wellworn & frictive.
The knot hardly jammed in any real sense as far as untying is
concerned (it got tight enough to resist loosening).
I repeated this loading with super-slick PP monofilament marine
kernmantle of like diameter; this stuff loosens easily (did I say
"super-slick"? !!).
As for what knot tyers "will" do, well, yeah, all sorts of things
can happen. In other places, one can read of Rosendahl's bend
("Zep.") being capsized in part and jammed to the point of
needing tools (and special verbal utterances) to untie; that is
a circumstance of (a) loosely set knot from big stiff bull rope
(laid), (b) disturbance of being hauled through a rocky surface,
and (c) high load. Knot tyers might well mis-tie anything, and
indeed one can see mistaken presentations of various knots as
simple as the ones discussed here. Often, a good final result
is not presented; the words given "dress & set" have an empty
ring, thus, for there is no guidance to what that means (often
because the author doesn't know).
--dl*
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