old school stuff!

http://www.backpacker.com/skills-sept-2010-fit-to-be-tied-four-common-knots/articles/14441?utm_source=newsletter01&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter03

I know this is pretty useless stuff but for some odd reason I just like to know my knots and how to tie them then to know when to use them.  A friend of mine, back when I was like a sophomore in high school taught me some really neat stuff one year working at scout camp.  This guy was one of those guys that could survive any where, any time, with anything.  He was like Bear Gryls before there was a Bear Gryls.  We were doing alot of fun "ewok village" stuff one week just because we were bored and were working on a monkey bridge that went between two towers we built but the monkey bridge was about 50 yards long and we were having problems getting the ropes tight enough and also keeping the towers from collapsing.  That is when my buddy busted out the old school truckers knot.  The truckers knot you see above and can read about in the www.backpacker.com article I posted is used to hold things down or to gain mechanical tension in holding something tight.  Think of a trucker with a load of gear on the back of his rig and doesn't have any ratchet straps, tarps, or stuff to hold the gear down he can use a truckers knot to tie things down with more force than he could by just pulling the rope with only brute muscle strength.  Our monkey bridge was staked out with five foot long stakes that were about six inches around that we hammered into the ground with an axe and we used three of them.  Then on each stake we had a rope with the figure "A" part you see above and we used the loop as a pulley and progressively on each stake repeated figure "A" and that created a monkey bridge that could hold an entire village of ewoks on.

The only downside to this new truckers knot that I learned was when it came time to tearing down our elaborate ewok village the part in figure "A" you see above we just used simple over hand knots which once tightened down fully and had a thousand kids running up and down the bridge was impossible to take out of the rope.  So we had to cut the rope at the last over hand knot we put in and sacrafice the un-tie-able section to the knot gods.  I know this story is going somewhere, the picture above shows a better start to the truckers knot by using the over hand loop.  From my ewok village issues years back I have always avoided using a truckers knot because of the possible loss of the rope.  Now I know a better, modified version of the truckers knot I can put this old school knot back into my arsenal of knot weapons for future need of tying down crap in my truck the next time one of my ratchet straps give out.  It just goes to show that if you always keep an open mind and stay informed, you can learn cool new things just like I did.