per Dan Lehman:
1) A_S, your red-bolded line is not true,
and an empirical examination of in-use-by-climbers
knots will show this.
?
Your comment is only true for cases of incompetence.
That is, a climber who does not diligently dress and cinch his/her tie-in knot is either:
1. Reckless
2. Incompetent
The issue of recklessness or incompetence should not be the basis of an experiment to induce a failure mode on Scotts locked Bowline.
This would add too many variables.
In all knot testing, it is nominal to tie the specimen knot diligently and accurately - otherwise the results may not be valid (unless you are specifically testing for some other stated variable).
In the specific case of Scotts locked Bowline (for climbing) - the tester must ensure that the knot is accurately dressed and cinched tight.
The reason for this is that the aim of the test is to snag and disrupt the collar - to induce a failure mode.
Obviously, if the tester deliberately tied the knot in a loose dressing state - that would skew the results - because obviously, the tester has created conditions that favor a successful snag.
There is a growing movement amongst climbers to undertake a 'partner check'.
The idea behind this check is to detect errors and correct them before commencing the activity.
Checking the tie-in knot is a mission critical action.
A wrongly tied knot could have catastrophic consequences.
Dan - are you suggesting that a test regime to induce the purported failure mode requires the specimen knot to be tied loosely?
Or are you suggesting that the loosely tied knot would serve as the experimental
control?
If you do suggest a
control that uses a loosely tied knot - that would be valid as it would provide a comparison against the knot that was properly dressed and cinched up tight.
And yes the discussion has been about a non-tight rope
into the subject knot.
From who's point of view?
I'll repeat that a loosely tied knot isn't valid to base an argument from.
Any loosely tied knot can snag on a protuberance - thats like stating that a shoe lace is not valid because if its tied loose, it will fail.
Obviously a shoe lace will fail to hold if its tied too loose to begin with.
Another example of invalid testing: I declare Tesla electric cars to be unsafe because they cant stop quickly enough on greased road surfaces. That is, I'll apply grease to the road surface and then test the Tesla vehicle to see if it can stop quickly from 100kph (60 mph). If it cant stop within a certain distance, I'll declare that vehicle to be unsafe.
I also understand that if I tie any eye knot into my climbing harness too loosely - it will likely fail and I could die.
Thats stating the
obvious.
Dan - the real issue here is that the OP made an announcement on an open public forum about a failure mode of Scotts locked Bowline in climbing applications.
Why make such an announcement to the world if the knot was in a loose initial dressing state?
What does that prove?And more to the point, why continue to defend such a failure mode as the OP has done?
Do you see my point? The OP is now determined to tender argument to support his claim that there is a serious failure mode with Scotts locked Bowline.
If this were simply a case of
"Heh, lets loosen Scotts locked Bowline and then see if we can induce structural failure" - I think the OP would have stopped trying to defend his proposition.
But he isn't. He is intent on pointing out the failure mode.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.Because Scotts locked Bowline is used in life critical applications - the burden of proof lies with the tester to create valid test conditions to prove the failure mode.
It might be valid to use a loosely tied Scotts locked Bowline as the
experimental control.
But, you must also test properly dressed and cinched Scotts locked Bowlines to compare against - otherwise your test results are invalid.
It would be invalid to publish test results based only on the control group (ie loosely tied knots) - and declare
all Scotts locked Bowlines as potentially insecure.