Do you have any test data to support this? I have only done informal testing on cord with my body weight and never had a problem untying the knot
Test data ?
Have you ever seen ANY "test data" about how easy or difficult is to untie a knot ? is there an established scientific methodology which can measure some parameters that are related with this procedure ? The "data" can not be just some numbers collected during a not-well-defined procedure ! Can we "measure" the forces that are required to twist and pull a certain collar of a certain bight at the same time ? Here we can not agree if the "
front-ness" is intrinsic to the knots or not, and we will agree on
this ?
The interesting thing is that nobody asks test data to support the opposite, that claim the so-called "
Zeppelin loop" is easy to untie - because most people are victims of the same myth : The Zeppelin bend is easy to untie, the so-called "
Zeppelin loop"
looks like the Zeppelin bend, have "
about the same properties ( ! ! ) and an identical ( ! ! ! ) knot body "(sic) , so, by deduction, the so-called "
Zeppelin loop" is as easy to untie as the Zeppelin bend !
Of course, nobody
looks at the two loaded knots, to "see" that this overhand knot tied on the Standing part, when loaded by 100% and 50% of the total load, shrinks, locks around the more lightly loaded overhand knot tied at the Tail, and becomes compact and rock solid ! The difference from a genuing Zeppelin bend, where the overhand knots are not loaded by both sides, or from a bowline, where we do not even have an overhand knot tied on the Standing part, is almost self-evident - but myths do not need
any evidences, do they ?
I have tested not only this particular evil imposter, but also ALL the other eye-knots where the nipping structure is an overhand knot tied on the Standing end, and I have always seen the same thing - which should have been expected, of course ! There is no relation whatsoever between the easiness one can untie a bowline or a genuine Zeppelin knot, a "
rope made hinge", with what happens in almost all of the
dozens and dozens of the eye-knots based on interlinked overhand knots ( the "B" series of bends in Miles. and then some ! ). There are even some such knots which, once tied and loaded heavily enough, they become a dense mass of rope material which simply can not be released without a marlinspike - like the eye-knot based on the Oyster bend, for example.
Moreover, I have seen that the eye-knots are more difficult to untie even in the cases where we have one only overhand, and
even in the cases where this overhand knot is tied on the Tail, not on the Standing part ! In fact, one should be a little
lucky to tie an eye-knot where one link is an overhand knot, that will not be difficult to get untied !
I have tried to explain the "ratcheting" mechanism that accumulates tensile forces within a shrinking convoluted tangle, in the not-so-expected ( by me, at least ...) case of the humble Clove hitch (1). I have tied a number of crossing knot- based eye-knots, where only one overhand knot was tied, and that was tied on the Tail (2), but the easiness of untying remained distinctively inferior from the bowline or from the Zeppelin bend.
Then, why people do not acknowledge this simple fact ? Judging only from the superficial appearances, by the "looks", the outline of the ropes, ignoring what is happening inside them, is one obvious reason, of course. The other reason is that they do never load the eye-knots to their strength limits - and this is also responsible for another knotting myth, that the weak point of the bowline is the bight component, which can slip through the nipping turn - so all we have to so to tie a "secure"bowline is to increase the nipping power of the nipping turn ( which is simply impossible, but lets us not discuss this now...), or add more U-turns to the bight component - and all the problems of the bowline will be miraculously resolved at once !
The truth is that
the weak point of the bowline is its main component, the nipping turn, and this weakness is not related to its nipping power, by to its stability. Even if the bight component will not slip through the nipping turn, the later can be forced to open up, and release its grip on the former.
Knots where the two limbs of a nipping structure are driven within and pulled out of shrinking surrounding openings, and can be squeezed by the cocoon the other rope segments weaved around those openings, are prone to jam or to be difficult to get untied. An overhand knot or a fig.8 knot, especially when it is tied on the Standing part, should always be suspect, and, if possible, it should be avoided. It is not by chance that the bowline and the Zeppelin bend do not jam ! They shrink, they become compact, but they do not accumulate the tensile forces inside them, because the limbs of the nipping structures that penetrate them through the "core" of the nub are not imobilized by the encircling strands of the "mantle "of the nub.
My main point in my previous post was not the easiness or not of untying the evil imposter of the genuine Zeppelin loop, but its altogether different structure, which does not use the unique geometry of the Zeppelin bend ! A
fake thing is not something that simply is
different, it is something that, although it is different, pretends to be "
identical"! THAT is what ome people had imagined they discovered in this easy pass-par-tout of eye-knots, in order to stop searching for anything else - and snub everybody Else that dares to present something different. Parroting is more effective when it is a repetition of the same reduced number of myths over and over again, so the quality they do not have is hopefully substituted by mere quantity ! We take the most simple, most symmetric, most beautiful, most unique in its working, most easy to tie, to inspected and to untie bend, and what do we do with this gem ? We shamelessly throw it into box with dozens of dozens faux bijoux - having destroyed its most useful qualities in the mean time : gone is the symmetry, the hinge-like mechanism, the easiness of inspection, the easiness of untying it after heavy loading, to say nothing about the easiness of tying it in the first place...- and, by doing everything
unfair to this miracle of nature which was offered to us by the mother KnotLand, we reduce it to a
hybrid, which is to the original Zeppelin bend just what the name tells : a
hybris.
1.
http://igkt.net/sm/index.php?topic=4347.02.
http://igkt.net/sm/index.php?topic=3962.0
