Are Sharpies on Climbing Ropes Safe? Break tests with Sharpie Permanent Markers vs Beal Rope Marker

are you are you staying in the right spot we got to get this action shot here with kitty cat are Sharpies bad for your ropes has been emailed and messaged to me so many times and I assume not because I'm still here but uh Brent Roth here who's part of our Canyon playlist is going to demonstrate uh that he actually uses the right product a rope marker and how he does it is because he like tells how to make it work even better and all the stuff and then we're going to do some tests at the end of this video of me saturating some ropes in this material and actually testing some fingernail polish which he uses for the ends of his rope side you know make him easier to see so we're going to do a lot of rope in rope care and how to douse them in chemicals that aren't approved for any of this stay tuned oh you didn't say anything in that intro no I just looked at you and shook my head and agreed yeah it confirms that what I'm saying is like helpful yeah you're introducing me which I'm going to take over the video from you okay so yeah say hi my name is Brent hi my name is Brent and I and welcome to my gear wall yeah say that okay hi I'm Brent and welcome to my gear wall where are we talking guys keep going we got the first line all you told me to say you did it great it was on the telephone I just thought you were here when I did the intro so you knew what we were going to talk about so did you ever use Sharpies on your ropes um I I there was a time that I did but I just got lazy and I didn't like the the way it it marked the ropes like it was just time consuming sitting there scribbling and it looked like you know a third grader did it no offense to third graders I uh mark my ropes and I feel like it's only on that top surface it doesn't stay on there very good and yeah it really it smells funny and I don't really know if it's bad for my rope so we're gonna find out I'm actually gonna I'm looking forward to the break test yeah I've been a huge fan of this product one it's a lot easier to use um it can be Messier you get it all over your hands but I have yet to have an issue with it on my rope cool he's gonna actually show us marking a rope so we can see the process be able to not sponsor this but you're more than welcome to Bill if you want so this has a list of companies here Brands and it says only used for Brands which have approved it so not sure why it wouldn't work on one rope and not the other but Safety First when you're talking about liability can't be worse than a Sharpie anyways is do you know what this is water-based is it like wash off with your hands or yes it it well if you do it quickly if you let it dry well and you got to work at it but you can't wash it off with your hand or with work with your hands with water you can't yes but I use a majority of my ribs or ropes are always used in water and the real ink is still on there so I think there's a time limit you've got if it's still wet where it'll Lush off with water but once it dries on that road water's not gonna obviously you're not gonna use it while the Ink's still wet I mean I have seen it I don't recommend it because you end up saturating your rope so much that they could still be wet if you're doing it the night before like I plan most my trips right exactly gotcha and it gets wet it'll bleed on everything else um so we're gonna now carry the camera around and show you ropes he's done in the past how much it's worn off ropes he's freshly done and um you stayed here through the whole thing congratulations cool so let's get after it so Brent are you trying to make me feel self-conscious about my gear wall because like I've never seen somebody with so many figure eights that look like they've all been on an acid trip I mean you guys you you really like going down stuff apparently I I do I do um and I just I get a lot of this just because I'm curious and I like to play with things um as you agree to like an eight-year-old anyway so I buy something I play around with it I do some testing on it but I don't have the ability to break things yeah yet that's why you should be there you should be the gear review Department because you've got the gear for it so you've brought these two ropes in uh show us a new one so uh all of my ropes these are canyon-based rope this one is made by a company called Atwood so this is a polyester sheath so you can see this is that Beal rope marker uh what it looks like recently marked it um and it's it's worn in the material pretty well I've got a rope over here that is the same rope that is a lot older and pretty well used see this is what it looks like after time it had a pretty heavy season in 2019 that and see that uh put some questionable damage in it and okay it's not fully retired yet but I mean it's obviously the Mark is lasting longer than what the life of the rope that I'm using but you're going down Canyons with this stuff beating up on them pretty hard and it's very important since we're doing retrieval systems that you know where the middle of the rope's at so I don't set a wrong longer rope length than what I have to retrieve it so the middle Mark is very important for us because you're not tying knots in the end of your rope you really need to know where the end of your rope is yes yeah okay which will cover actually the nail polish and why when it gets damaged and I cut off 10 feet off of one end the middle Mark is now kind of this is another canning rope so this is a technora sheath um you can see it's it's about the same this is an older rope as well this is on its third season this year so you can still see it but like if you set it down it's yeah muscle minnows whereas this this is that's a beauty yeah Brent why do you have a bathtub for your ropes uh because I like clean things do you go down dirty Canyons I feel like that waterfall cleaned me out pretty good yeah it's pressure washing and then then I do wash them in here because river water has algaes and microorganisms and stuff in there that if you don't wash it kind of gets this funky low water river smell to it look at that hey I found the middle of the rope and this tiny little rope oh wow so this rope is a pure dyneema okay I mean you can see the ink is stuck to that dyneema had my doubts on whether or not it would actually work on this material this is new for me this year so I marked it only a couple trips ago but this is its third time down in Canyon in a very wet environment and the diameter is this six this is six mil yep wow so you repel on floss sometimes well if you have big spaces in your teeth yes this is floss okay so that's pure dyneema yep these are all the different materials that he has here's another one there's another rope company out of Switzerland he's making uh canning ropes that actually float so I was curious if the material was any different it's another Blended rope um and I marked this what is this dyneema polyester sheath yep okay and uh it's a been an excellent rope it does float really well and it holds the beetle ink exceptionally well there's another one another Blended rope and this one's on its third season as well it's a techno or a polyester blend Canyon Luxe and it's holding color pretty well um I'll show you what I do my process for how I think I embed the ink a little bit more rather than just painting it on the surface because I have seen situations where you paint this on the surface and especially if you're going to get it wet the next day which can happen with Climbers on a rainy day and it bleeds all over the rope and now you have like seven middle marks and it's not really relative to what you need I'm sorry not to laugh uh totally I was totally paying attention still running through the yard and it gets Ryan's attention so have you found a material that doesn't work on uh not yet okay not a rope material cool well let's see your process on really dousing this stuff what you doing Brent I am getting ready to demonstrate how I find the middle of a rope that isn't marked and I'm going to try not to make a mess out of this but it usually happens anyway I'm from the way it stores so I'm gonna take an end and I find the place in your workspace that I would say you set up as as a high directional and I run one end through like that and take the other end of the Rope and run it through a carabiner and through another Carabiner and you'll see why this matters here in a moment I line up the ends I'm going to start pulling these evenly and I'm just going to start pulling this as fast as I want you can see how this starts to twist so rather than putting a bunch of twists in my rope that second Carabiner keeps them separate cool so it doesn't matter how long the Rope is this process can go fairly quickly if you don't have a lot of space if you don't have like a 45 foot drop tower to yeah 45 foot drop tower 300 foot driveway you know gotcha you need to feel like they're ripped and then oh that's pretty cool yeah okay so it was at the center and then if I'm really being right about it I use a Sharpie and I go okay that's where but if that's not tested run number one went now I'm going to take this out and then I'm going to feed this back through and clip this guy and I'm going to hold that Center and I'm going to verify this one more time and I'm gonna look to see if the end whoa whoa all right so question with rope creep over time and use can the if you keep using especially the same end for whatever reason could your middle move um based on we could show you uh some of the repel ropes I have specifically with the dyneema core the sheath will move like up to a foot okay so if the center of your rope is so critical that a foot would make a difference then whatever you're doing every other time I would flip the end of the rep in use so then if you get if it's if it's a one foot creep you get six inches on both ends theoretically your Center is still in the middle and if you're that worried about finding the center of your rope then I would just do this process regularly and verify you're still in the middle before using it but usually one foot difference shouldn't really matter oh so this is why I do this process three times to see where am I and I'm just kind of a sigma 3 guy okay I'm gonna calculate the standard deviation of how often you're wrong yes and you can see the process is fast enough or it's like okay I'm going to do this three times am I in the middle oh so that's twice so that Mills a little off so what am I going to do to fix it make your metal marker longer oh yeah let's just do that so maybe I'll just make that middle marker all the way to this point how convenient to have a rope we have to mark let's go ahead and do that so this stands for soak all the ropes yeah soak all your ropes hook all your rope so I found the workspace if I don't want to get ink all over everything that I'm doing I've been using this piece of foil to protect my workspace and then I use it to like dab the little bit so I put that in and also this prevents the aliens from infusing my rope with any strange signals so here's the section of rope that I'm going to Mark see that's where I just marked it with the Sharpie until it's proven otherwise this guy watch how this works it is reverse threaded okay I'm gonna take that off and then there's this other piece that the first time you use it this is reverse threaded has this cap in there that I'm going to grab very carefully oh shut off the spill so so it doesn't dry out when I'm not using it the first bottle that I had I marked a couple ropes and then went back to use it and it was just dried out mess so that I notice it stays right there and then I'm going to thread this back on reversed reverse threaded cool and try to keep it off my hands which as much as I can yeah and then I'm just going to start marking this with a wheel look how nice and ah that is way better than a Sharpie oh my gosh for me to do a length that long with a sharpie would take like two Sharpies all right make sure we get all of it that's pretty good all right so I'm going to set that over there I like to take this foil I'm just going to mash that in a little bit foreign and then I'll let that set for a few minutes be right back oh no you're gonna get a mustache so after I've let this set for several minutes I don't know I've never really timed it I'm gonna come back with a blotting cloth or some some kind of paper towel or paper towel it's a technical term and I'm just going to blot the excess Material off this and then I do this because well I'm marking my rope the night before I plan on using it you know I don't want to bleed all over the place how long have you noticed it takes for this to properly dry I usually will set it up overnight like it's just not worth it but this system this technique when I let leave it hanging overnight to dry I haven't had an issue with the Rope the next day yet so I would say the process that I have right now is what is working best for me and keeping in mind that this also is a rope that I'm going to get extremely wet the next day so I do that and then I do this cool little trick on a caribou I come over here and I'm like wow because I noticed that if I put a lot of ink in this and I just let it dry like this it actually gets really stiff like to the point where it's hard to um it doesn't set a knot well if one strand in the knot has got this this in it and one strand does not or just whatever I've gotten in fact you can see how the bend radius changes a little bit there where that's older and then that's the section that I just did so to fix that I come over here and I just start cycling this back and forth while it's fresh yep while it's fresh and this is where I've gotten the best imprint of the ink into the ropes so far these seem to be pretty dark for a while so black makes a zero more flexible and deeper into the so you're not worried about ink on the Carabiner it'll it'll wear off well yeah it'll come off this is an old used Carabiner but um it just yeah what I see is that it just either goes on in the next rope or whatever super good enough I do have a while I'm like okay now I'm tired and I'm gonna leave that until it's ready to be back for the next day how do you mark the end of your ropes so it's really important for us in Canon Inc to know where the end of the Rope when we want to set specific rope length based on where the water is at or whatnot and not all the canning ropes are easy to see in water I mean we've got some white ropes the neon green ones are usually easier to see but we don't get to control that so I have learned I marked the end of my rope with some really bright fingernail polish and this stuff is I mean it's lasted a while it's pretty thick I'm not worried is it going to degradate the end of my rope that I'm coming off of anyway it doesn't really matter but what you got to know is that not all rope materials are the same base material so melting won't necessarily work you can't melt Dynamic to to polyester or whatnot so it's using it with super glue to seal the ends and then I paint it like this so I can see it so this is a soft shackle here so you can see here how the super glue is what makes it look like he was able to melt it but you cannot melt dyneema that's not true you can melt dyneema but not together it'll melt all right pretty low actually but uh not not in the way you want it to so um what's interesting is this rope has actually had some uh what'd you call it creep where the sheath is actually uh slipped over so I can feel it right about well that's so stiff that I can actually pinch the thing but yeah that's uh that's probably too stiff to put in the middle of a rope anyways yeah I definitely would not want to Mark the middle of my rope with this even if it proved to be safe yeah it doesn't matter it's just way too stiff and brittless but I I really like that for the end of a rope I'm learning just all sorts of Tricks um and yeah super glue you just like dip it or no you taped it yeah so I run I've got my little uh rope uh managing kit box up here uh so I use electrical tape around the end of the Rope first and that's what gives me a little spot to uh to cut because as soon as you cut the rope yeah yeah so I wrap it with electrical tape and I cut through the tape yes yes cut a section of the tape off and then you get a really nice tight bound material and then I just start saturating the end of it with a bunch of super glue what if that reduces the strength of the end of your rope fine if if I am down to this relying on the end of this rope and whatever I'm doing it means I learned something from how not to highlight saturate the end of it and then let it dry for a while then I take the electrical tape off and then after after the elections after the Super Glue dries you take the tape off if you're smart you'll do that or you can do it anyway yeah otherwise it super glues the tape to the knot to the Rope actually I've never had the super glue it doesn't really stick electrical tape oh all right so it doesn't matter gotcha and that's what you did with our special soft shackle is you Electro tape electrical taped and that's why your soft shackle looks so excited yes it's very exciting okay I learned a lot I actually really like doing this challenge because I end up learning a ton uh if I could subscribe to this channel I totally would but I can't because of my channel if you could do that for me I'd really appreciate it God I'm desperate even I subscribed look what it got me you working till nine o'clock at night showing us how to do so all right just for the subscribers so you still have asked for me to uh break test ropes with Sharpie trying to do a really lame transition here because I don't know how to use Premiere all right let's go to the lab welcome to the lab Let's test it okay so we're going to test two samples with the Sharpie and we're going to put the Sharpie in the middle of the Rope if it breaks in the knot we technically didn't lose any strength and then we're going to do two ropes with the beal rope marker as well even though that's technically approved and then we're going to do a short piece of rope soak that and find out if it actually gets into the core especially with the way I'm doing it where I'm soaking it super super thick let's find out if this Sharpie gets inside of the Rope oh look at that when we doused it the way we did yes on some of the strands actually on the outer part of all those strands the inner inner part's still good well we really really does I've never sharpied a rope that good yeah but it does get inside on the inner strands good to know let's find out how strong it is stop so the peak Force we got here is not 17 because I ran out of time it took so long to break that stretchy rope and look that actually looks like the s p 500. do you know how good this video would be if it actually broke at the Sharpie uh broken the knot you can only see one tail sticking out of here broke inside of these knots here and the Sharpie as you can see is basically not affecting the strength um at least in this test this is not science this is two tests this is not recommended by manufacturers please don't use Sharpies on ropes die and then blame me it is nicer to use a thick rope I think so we can really get a stronger test to find out if it's compromising the material if we use something super thin like five or six millimeter well we're not going to get a high enough Force to maybe compromise the polyester slash nylon what is this rope Bobby not sure we're not sure what this rope is and it's an old rope but let's test the beel sample we have and then we'll go from there foreign foreign wow this chart goes up and then down I never was gonna suspect that's how these charts would look shocking results the Beale wrote marker also broken the knots cool so they're both showing the same results but I also like the BL rope marker because it actually goes on really really good without having to like open up Sharpies the way we did

Channel: HowNOT2

Views: 151,726

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: beWcB4jRQYg

Length: 22min 47sec (1367 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2021