American Death Triangle is a Myth

need to apologize not just for the clickbait title but for the shirt cause i feel like there's a few things wrong with it but can't identify what they are uh the american death triangle i was taught which is this and my hands being the bolts put a magical amount of force on these bolts possibly in a magical amount here and then it could even break the bolts nylon versus bolts anyways i'm not saying this is a good anchor i am not advocating that this is a way you should build an anchor you want to share the load between two anchor points the way i have it configured here is both fingers are going to see about 50 of what i'm pulling down on which is great the wider you go the more force it sees to where you see lots and lots now as a highliner i discovered one day that we basically made a sport out of taking factor two falls on death triangles so on unsheathed ropes when i see science that is too sterile with all the variables that could happen i love to whip out all my dynamometers and do some backyard science so stay tuned for that [Applause] [Music] hello my name is ryan jinx and welcome to the slack snap lab where we drilled a few holes in the concrete over there don't tell larry so we can pull on his piranha machine and test the american death triangle now ideally at least we aren't planning on breaking anything today and so we're able to actually use all the dynamometers that we have or load cells we have two rock exotica enforcers and two line scale twos that we are going to embed in the system and we're gonna see where the forces are and we're gonna pull at different pressures and angles and all sorts of stuff so here in the slack snap lab we have all the dynamometers in a line so we can show you guys and know that the load cells are all reading the same ish all super close enough there's always a little bit of a variance in there but by building a foundation of what equals what we can just keep moving them around until we run out of things to test but we're going to find out if we get a magical force between the bolts the webbing the anchor or the master point and seeing if it's really an american death triangle or if it's bomber all right bobby what's our setup most of the american death triangles that i seen are tied so they do an equilateral triangle and if i remember geometry which i don't really um equilateral means all the angles are the same so i have a anglo-motor um thing not sure the correct name for this that i stole from larry's shop so how are you feeling you're walking around a little bit more uh yeah first time down here since i had the cast off my leg we were reading comments this morning the the video that we released this morning a little behind the scenes uh was the expired glue ryan made a comment about super cured enough and one of the comments on that video which i laughed at was that's what i tell my patients they're super cured enough so is that what you are right now uh not yet okay so what angle does that say it's really close to a 60 degree angle you can zoom in there if you want it's the the white mark there yeah right in that same ballpark it's in the ball part pretty good for backyard science and the third one this angle is slightly greater it looks like it might be a 70 degree angle but for what we're doing i think it's close enough just in case you're curious we put a sling around the piranha because we don't think we're going to be moving that and then we have our smc pulleys which is part of our slack snap outdoor system now we're going to turn all the dynamometers on and start pulling go for it i just want to see you pull if the prada moves i'm going to laugh i'd like to talk about the units of measurement here our gear is rated in kn or kilonewtons [Music] and no is that not how you say it i can say newton well but when i say kill a newton i always add that t at the end regardless kilonewtons are what our gear is rated in pounds of force is kind of like pretty american-centric and our audience is 50 50 around the world so when you're repelling you're probably not putting more than one on if you're repelling on a very static rope in a jerky manner you might get two and we have a caving video right here where we uh show the forces during a repel on a very very static rope the reason kilonewtons is used is because mass times acceleration is different than my mass sitting on this chair if i fell 100 feet the force i would put on whatever i'm attached to would be more than bobby standing there attached to the same item even though he's a little heavier than i am so speed mixed with weight adds a different element to things so pounds of force and kilograms of force are used less just so we can kind of wrap our head around it but let's say a slack line sees a little over a thousand pounds of force when my 160 pounds is on the slackline falling not walking so anyways enough about units we're going to use kilonewtons here and we're going to see what peak force we got when bobby and i were pulling which is kind of exciting to show you this it's kind of fun here is our master point two and a half guess what the bolts are bolt number one one point nine six bolt number two two point zero two and our middle point of the webbing was 0.9 so bobby do you think those are also 0.9 i believe those will also be 0.9 your doctor doesn't watch this does he i don't think so he should turn away if he is 2.90 and we put the dynamometer here on one of the legs 1.64 which is more than half but slightly slightly 2.46 is less than the master point and 2.46 is less than the master point so these are obviously reading the same but uh huh what do you think so far uh it's about what we expected doing the research on this um so it is not sharing the load very well it's putting about the same amount or a similar amount of force on each bolt rather than half of the amount of force on each bolt while bobby is measuring that angle i'd like to bring up our sponsor today serene how to build an anchor properly please don't use the stuff you see in this backyard science video as a way to build an anchor just thought i'd throw that out there in case you were watching all the way through okay what angle is that so that looks like a 130 degree angle um when i'm teaching people how to build anchors i instruct them to use less than a 90 degree angle at this point okay and what does that do so theoretically once your angles are above 90 you might actually be multiplying the force that you're putting on each bolt rather than sharing it interesting test number three with our wide angle is a 2.38 master point and a 3.5 on the bolts on pretty much both sides 3.5 3.6 and then this is a 1.39 right here which is approximately a little more than half of that [Music] those are the numbers there's the angle there's whatever people might say we're not pulling evenly on this i don't know how we would maybe that's why so with this wide angle we have uh 1.5 times more force being applied to the bolts than the master point and this master point we're getting 2.38 you could get up to double that in a normal climbing scenario not in like a top rope scenario i don't think but like if you were to take a fall in a climbing gym you're unlikely to get more than five without doing some weird stuff so if you do 1.5 times five kilonewtons that's about seven and a half seven and a half is not ideal but it's very good within a range for bolts it's super good enough for carabiners i'm not quite sure why it's so bad to do this now if you're doing this on trad gear we have broken mini cams in the eight kilonewton range so or at least they come out or whatever so if you're building an a trad anchor yes that's uh a problem if you're putting eight kilonewtons on an anchor i'm not saying build an anchor like this i'm just saying it's not nearly as bad as i thought it was now the fact that this isn't getting magical forces on the bolts that are going to explode them at any moment you don't have redundancy you're not sharing the load which is ideal and your sling you're only getting whatever the strength of the single strand is rather than like that doubled up version of like a sliding x gives you a lot more strength out of your sling this isn't just about the bolts and if you just now notice ct behind me you're not really paying attention to this video so now we're going to decrease the angle and see what kind of numbers we get for science uh 40 degrees 40 degrees 44 45. that's about how many celsius degrees it'll be today here is our fourth test with our narrow angles 2.68 at the master point 1.84 1.94 and .93 what's your thought on that so we're sharing the load a little bit better um we're not down to uh 50 yet on each anchor though okay so i know or i've learned that the more narrow the angle the more it's going to share the load up to a certain point where it just shares it but i thought the actual cross being the top of the triangle being straight was just like this exponential magical force that's going to just make the carabiners or bolts explode even though technically the sling would break first this is super interesting that we're not even getting a hundred percent of this in a death triangle it's all dependent on this angle here i was just doing a rappel with brian sheridan after struggle-busting samuel climbing up the royal arches about whether or not when we repelled whether or not that angle that we created by putting the rope directly into those bolts gave us a death triangle so let's try that next the moment i've been waiting for repelling bobby is going to lower us as i pull us and this is the most extreme angle i could ever think of on a repel situation uh to see what kind of force we get on these bolts so lock it off bobby and i will pull as hard as i can get to maybe one killing on our master point which is pretty much all any normal person's going to put on ow all right a 1.84 or really heavy person is going to generate three kilonewtons on each bolt that is interesting so we're gonna reset these now test number two right about there yeah let's see what that does ow i need to stop doing that wow i just nail it my hand strength is consistent 1.89 gives you maybe 30 percent more than that master point at 2.58 and 2.58 so it does actually put more force on the bolts than you're actually putting on the master point me personally i'm not putting on more than one when i'm repelling i'm just not that heavy let's do it uh let's do it again all right here's our third test bobby give us a little slack ow oh my gosh every time i say ow it's exactly the same all right it's still higher than the master point but but by less so this is this is interesting so you are getting death triangles when you're repelling like this when you thread your rope through the two rings directly like that but it doesn't matter at what point do you think we're going to get equal numbers it's not even sharing the load we still want to get this point to be the same number as this point which is a hundred percent of the load instead of fifty percent of the load yeah i don't know that we'll get there really yeah i don't i don't think we'll ever get those bolts to 50 of this load with no no not in this oh interesting yeah now if these bolts were extended and almost touching they would be sharing 50 of the load i don't think so we can try it ooh i love not agreeing on something that is a much more narrow angle let's see wrap it around your body let's see if i can consistently get pointy 1.84 i'm losing strength in my hand oh this is quite the angle 1.56 ah sick finally less than 100 of the the repel device or the master point but you're right i don't know if we would actually see c5050 so let's try extending the two points together say you have a chain on your bolts and see if the bolts are getting 50 of the load then with the rope just going through one point at the tip of the chain okay test number i lost count but we have chains going down to this master point and finding out if these are going to share the load let's get to 1.84 bobby wow ow oh my god that's amazing anyways oh science i thought that'd be sharing the load that is like almost 100 of of that of course it's nice to have redundancy and you still have like a 20 to 1 safety ratio here but what do you think that's surprising i've never thought of that when i was repelling yeah i love testing things that don't matter yeah do you think this bolt is seeing the same force as as that do you think we should put them in line to see if the force is the same throughout the whole it absolutely won't be because that's what we were testing earlier it's that same angle thing that we're dealing with oh i don't know man we got to do some science all right dynamometer dynamometer let's do some science ow all right i'm getting weaker 1.65 1.26 pretty much the same yeah so why is that different than the other angles that we were seeing why is that chain not carrying 50 a load in that because the angle is not that is this angle less than 60 90 it's less than 90 god damn it this angle is not get the protraction i think it is it's not a protraction yeah that's not a protraction that is a protractor yeah so we're dealing with two different types of forces here so like we have it it's split here and then this is the triangle shape yeah but barely i mean that's it's barely a that's barely a triangle shape but it goes all the way through and so it's pulling these two together right i guess so what's the angle of this 100 degrees ah that's got to have something to do with it i bet if we extended these to be less acute or why don't we just unscrew these put these bolts like normal distance and see what happens because this is not this is not a normal anchor yeah so if i go like this do you think i'll be trolled for the gate being pushed up against the ground totally or do you think i'm going to be trolled for having the gates not opposed yeah even more unsafe oh my gosh you cannot win on youtube i would call this a normal anchor let's find out what happens ow that really does hurt 1.66 i'm getting softer as the day goes on here [Music] it's not quite half but it's a lot better what do you think i don't have a thought on this not none whatsoever after all morning of pulling on this no i think we should do a more normal anchor that's not a triangle shape we have now reset to a somewhat proper anchor what do you what's the angle we got here this is the biggest sliding x i've ever seen so we're we're pretty close to 60 degrees which is what we did with the original american death triangle okay um this still has the same issue of it's not redundant as the american death triangle say if a rock comes down and hits any one of these it could cut through and compromise the whole anchor cool let's uh let's pull all right let's see what i can do with two hands ow 2.62 drum roll please one point four two one point six two yeah so we're getting a lot closer to almost yeah like sixty percent and if we bring in the angle more it will get even closer i believe perfect but i'll never get less than 50 i don't think that's how it works not with a sliding x it would you get less if you got more on one side yeah if you if you statically equalized it you could see all the load on one side and no load on the other that happens in highlining one more test here's an obtuse one without the death triangle if you build your anchors like this you probably shouldn't go climbing but let's find out what kind of person 2.16 2.5 that is interesting that it's only 100 uh maybe 120 of the master point what angle is that bobby so 130 there 133 degrees yeah cool so the american death triangle is not as deathy as i thought because it has that 180 degree piece at the very top but that 180 degree vector force that you see as infinite force in those vector charts doesn't technically apply it's where the bottom of the triangle is and you can never achieve 180 degrees of that of the triangle now i'm not saying the american death triangle is a good thing not only is you you're only getting a hundred percent of the strength of a sling instead of 200 percent in a sliding x per se it is putting more than 100 of whatever you're doing on those bolts and if you're going to just do that why not clip to just one bolt which is not a good idea i'm just food for thought here so in order to feel less bad about promoting the american death triangle as something not terrible we're gonna put how to build an anchor properly after the jingle of this video and even though the american death triangle didn't show super weird vector forces i learned a lot about vector forces in real life here and that they actually do apply we got more than a hundred percent when we were going more obtuse than 120 degrees which is approximately how hot it feels right now uh we did not get an exact 50 50 of a sharing load when things were touching just like the vector chart shows so i learned a lot about angles the more acute your angles are the better it is so tomorrow i'm going to pre-paint the material here for the drop tower which i'm very excited because that means we can test a lot of theories and myths and things being called death things by the other party european death not drop tests anybody anyways put in the comments below what you want to see when we actually get that one up because pulling on the ground here is limiting we will be sure to chase down a lot of these rabbit trails because i love having multiple dynamometers and a system with a lot of variables because that's not real super clean science anyways love the backyard science here uh make sure you go to slackline.comshop because we got discount codes affiliate links help in there and donations help technically even more please click the like and subscribe button if you made it all the way to this point and if you stay past the jingle we're going to show you how to build a proper anchor see you [Music] welcome to the crash course of how to build an anchor please do not make this the only video you use before building an anchor for yourself if you can't tell from all my videos i am not an expert i just have been doing this long enough to know what i want in an anchor and it's not the american death triangle so common acronym used to teach this is serene the s stands for strong which is what these bolts are if you're using other stuff it may not be strong or secure you want this to be equalized or sharing the load and that's what a lot of this episode was about so this is a sliding x for example these are sharing the load they are seeing less than 100 of what i'm putting here on the master point you want it to be redundant so if this sling fails you're gonna die so one thing you can do is isolate these strands or legs by putting a knot in it or a girth hitch there are several ways to do this but by tying a lfk or a little fat knot here it isolates it so if this broke here you're fine if this broke here you're fine and it's isolated enough and this is what we do in our highline anchors so the second e is for efficiency you want it to be simple fast and not take a lot of gear in this case we just got the two carabiners and here we got two opposing locking carabiners here at the bottom so we got our redundancy sharing the load against some strong bolts the n stands for no extension which applies for some things uh we did find in a video around here that a shock load doesn't always happen if you have a dynamic rope in the system and so you don't want things to extend to where it'll be rubbing you don't want things to be extending if you have this giant anchor and it'll be shifting 15 feet but that's what this knot is for this knot solves a lot of those problems if this were to come apart cut break whatever you're still you're not shock loading it and the last a is for everything about this video angles and i think you learned all that in this video i'd say this cute angle here is acute enough for me uh keep them from being obtuse definitely less than 120 degrees and definitely do not do the american death triangle thank you for watching and this is the real end bye [Music] god [Music] oh [Music] go [Music]

Channel: HowNOT2

Views: 52,202

Rating: 4.9478908 out of 5

Keywords: Highline, highlining, highlines, slackline, slacklining, slacklines, ryan jenks, how not to highline, hownottohighline, highliner, slackliner, tutorial, how to, rope, webbing, weblocks, rigging, rig, balance community, extreme, SlackSnap, Dynamometer, slow motion, break test, bolt buster, boltbuster, break tests, stunts, world record, slo mo, Slacktivity, climbing, science, mythbusters, carabiner, daredevil, rope swing, rope jump, jackass, alex honnold, big wall, gear, climb, rappel, spacenet, cams, anchors

Id: 7sQNpjnJe40

Length: 27min 21sec (1641 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 30 2021