With asymmetric bends, like this one, you never know which link is the weak one
--i.e, which will slip or will break before the other-- ( which might not matter ),
or if the weaker link is a lot weaker than the other ( which matters a lot ! ).
Why don't/can't we know?
(The asymmetry in form has, as a consequence, an asymmetry in the distribution
of the forces within the knot s nub, which, by its turn, might result at one link
being a lot weaker than the other). And that is true even for the simplest,
more used and known asymmetric bend, the Sheet bend.
Which we have yet to learn anything about this presumed
behavior bias, despite the knot being centuries old! (What
does
that tell you?!)
Another reason is that the lack of symmetry makes those knots hard to inspect
--a wrongly tied symmetric knot ( where the one link is tied wrongly around the other)
will manifest the mistake at once, while this will not happen to an wrongly tied asymmetric knot.
This is utter rubbish : it can be much easier to determine
the correctness of an asymmetric knot than many of the
moderately complex symmetric ones --
sheet-bend-like ones
e.g. have one part (this is my "-like"ness) as the simple "U",
a bight, and need only recognition of whether the joining
end has been correctly reeved; whereas I believe that I can
tie an incorrect
fig.8 eyeknot (with one *half* an
overhandand pass it off as the Real McCoy to those rockclimbers who
praise it for being so easily checkable!
From the two variations of this thread, I prefer the second one
--where the tails leave the last bight and exit the knot pointing to opposite directions.
You are, then, way ahead of me, here,
who cannot make any sense of the OP's
"where the bight on the
left is towards you instead of away from you ..." : huh --the bight
is left-to-right evenly distant from the viewer in the perpendicular plane
of the image! (The only bight that conceivably comes "towards"
the viewer is the right-hand one in being reeved under-&-up
through the left-hand one.)
--dl*
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