Knots and Rope: Figure 8 on a Bight

[@MedWild]

See the instructor in this video (Dr. Howard Donner) give presentations and teach a variety of hands-on workshops at the upcoming National CME Conferences on Wilderness Medicine. All medical specialities are welcome! wilderness-medicine.com

[@davidmadisontheguardian]

I realized after tying the overhand knot from about three of your videos ago; that ONE MORE PIECE OF INFO IS REQUIRED. For it to look just like the one you tied; you need to not only place the working end over the standing end; but the loop needs to be inside your arms; or facing inwards or on the inside of the rope. When ALL of the conditions are met; you get the proper overhand knot; and it looks right. For me the easiest and quickest way to do this is to take the working end in my right hand, place it in my left palm with working end pointing up and left thumb pointing up (very natural to do this) and then loop it away from me, down over the top of my hand, so it drapes on the back of my hand, and then up underneath wrapping the underside of my hand and coming up my palm again. When done correctly, it looks like a figure 6 with the working end over the standing end. Now that I know how to tie the overhand knot so that it looks exactly like yours; I can go on to use that to tie the figure 8. And then once I have the figure 8; I can tie it on a bight. I now see that tying an overhand knot in a certain way assumes a certain 'handedness'. You can tie a left hand overhand knot; and it becomes a right hand underhand knot. Thus... one other condition is to specify whether it is right or left handed. Seems like the majority of people are right handed; but this could confuse the beejesus out of a left hander! Or maybe; I still don't quite understand the concept!

[@davidmadisontheguardian]

It's crazy how most times... it's the basics that trip us up the most. But once mastered... we can way more easily tackle harder knots, memorize them quicker, tie them faster and tie them exactly right every time. I'm fascinated by the mechanics of knot tying. For instance, tie the same overhand knot over and over again, one right next to the other; and the rope begins to spiral in one direction. A while back, I noticed that EVERY KNOT has to cross over into the third dimension; so I came up with a knot that stays on one plane: The idea is to think of a snake eating itself. If you extrude a cone; you can weave the pointed end through the hollow of the other end in a circle... push it inside itself enough times; and you create a FRICTION KNOT for all directions in one plane. I don't know why you would need this; but I thought the idea was pretty cool.

[@ihikefar]

I must be the smartest guy here.