Skills · skill
Essential Knots
Rigging · Beginner
- Difficulty
- Beginner
- Safety
- A loaded rope stores energy; stand out of line of a rope under tension. Never put a finger inside a loop that could tighten.
- Done When
- It holds under a hard pull, looks like the picture, and unties by hand afterwards.
- Tools
- A few metres of 8–10 mm rope; a post or rail to practise on.
- Category
- Rigging
Steps
Bowline: fixed loop — the rabbit comes out of the hole, round the tree, back down the hole; dress it tight.
Figure-eight on a bight: a stronger fixed loop, easy to check by eye.
Clove hitch: two turns to a post, quick on and off, not for a load that shifts.
Round turn and two half hitches: a secure hitch that can be tied and untied under load.
Sheet bend: joins two ropes of different sizes; doubled for slippery rope.
Trucker's hitch: a 3:1 purchase for tensioning a line.
The Science
A knot holds by friction, and each turn of rope over rope multiplies the grip — the capstan effect: tension falls exponentially with wrap angle. A good knot is one that grips harder as it is loaded and can still be untied afterwards. Every knot weakens the rope, typically to 50–75 % of its strength, because it bends the fibres over a small radius; the bowline and figure-eight are among the kinder ones.
How It Fails
A bowline tied backwards that capsizes under load. A clove hitch that walks off the end of a smooth pole. A knot that jams solid because it was loaded before it was dressed.
Summary
The half-dozen knots that cover most of what rope is asked to do: a loop that will not slip, a bend that joins two ropes, a hitch that holds to a post and comes off again.
Open on the Skills shelf — the interactive card, the filters, and everything alongside it.