I'm looking for a bend (knotting sense) for strands that don't much bend (mechanical sense). By "strands" I mean hawsers, ropes, cables, cords, fibres, filaments; I don't care about the size. I'm thinking of a situation where the minimum radius of curvature of the strand is much greater than the diameter, say more than 100 times greater.
Examples include the raw spaghetti of the heading, or certain fibre-optic cables, or perhaps a rusty wire rope which you trust under straight tension but doubt the result if you bend it.
Obviously people don't do this in practice, they would use another method like whipping or glueing or cable clamps (or boiling the pasta) etc., but humour me: how would you bend them together? I'm thinking of wrapping the strands around each other in opposite senses in a helix tracing out a *very* large circle, something like a torus knot/link. But my concern is that under tension the torus would shrink and the spaghetti/fibre optic/rusty hawser would be forced to bend. Similarly a *very* long blood knot might be okay, but I'm concerned that tension would shrink the semi-circular arcs at the ends of the knot where the strands double back on themselves.
Can you think of a better way?
