Fence Termination / End Knot Tied and Tested

g'day i'm tim thompson today i'm going to show you how to tie the end knot one of the most useful fencing knots there is and one you definitely need to know then i'm going to strength test it using the spiral fast strength testing bed then we're going to check out whether neat knots or untidy knots are actually stronger there is a theory going around that sloppy knots might actually be stronger and james higgins from walters fencing put me onto that theory so we're going to test it today using the spiral fast test bed if you like this video please hit the subscribe button give it a thumbs up got no idea how much it helps the channel oh and i do have a website let's get into it now we're going to be handling wire in this video so the first thing we want to do is whack on our speed dealers and stay safe the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to pass my wire through a staple that i've already put in the end of the post locating the knot and stopping it from slipping up and down we're going to pass this wire around the post so that my line wire is on the side of the post that i want my fence and my offcut is on the opposite side once i've got that in place i'm going to cross them over leaving about 30 centimetres of off cut that i'm going to be tying my knot with when i've got it in that position i simply fold it over into a horseshoe now i'm not going to cross over this wire again for a while the next thing i'm going to do is pull this wire out a little bit so that i can tuck my offcut through the hole i just made now i'm going to use my post as a guide for tying this knot so the next thing i'm going to do is pull this knot in nice and close and pull my off cut so that it goes straight down the post now without crossing my line wire i'm now going to pull up on the offcut so that it goes straight up the post so we've gone around and through down the post and then swung it around this way to go up the post now that i've tied my knot i can bend a crank handle in the end of my offcut and simply spin this around the line wire securing my end knot firmly in place now i'm going to show you a trick that does away with the need for pliers because i'm dealing with high tensile wire medium tensile wire will work fine too i've already bent this wire in one direction if i take my crank handle and bend that at 90 degrees and then spin it around this way the wire breaks straight off you've broken it with your bare hands don't need pliers to finish the fence now that we've tied off our wire i'm free to run it out tie it up at the other end and strain it up look out for some more knots in future videos where we demonstrate tying them and then we strength test them all right so now that we've figured out how to tie the termination knot let's test it out now i'm very fortunate the guys from spiral fast are still loaning us their straining test bed now this test bed has a pulley up this end attached to wire i've put a little post in here that's got wires run around it attached with spiral fasts to this pulley that means that we have the simulation of an end post in the middle of the test bed we're then going to tie an end knot around this end post and that is attached to a load cell which is connected to a digital readout box that tells us the tension on that line i've then got my mobile phone set up to record the tension on the line when the wire breaks we want to find out exactly how much load the end knot can take this will give us that we also want to find out if a neat end knot is stronger or weaker than a sloppily tied one now there is a theory there is a theory and james higgins alerted me to this so thank you james that a sloppy knot will actually because the curve of the wire is less because the radius bend of the wire is less that a sloppy knot might actually be stronger than a neat one so we're going to try that out i happen to have a sneaking suspicion that a sloppy knot will just stretch a lot which will be really bad for your fence down the line but at the end of the day they're not going to break at the same strength let's find out if that's the case let's put these knots to the torture test we'll do a couple of really well tied ones and then we'll do a couple of really sloppy ones and see if there's a difference okay test one neat termination knot starting to come under a bit of load now that was fun so on review it looks like that termination knot has failed where it's first crossed over the loop okay let's start testing some more now as i'm tying up this spiral fast nice and tight and getting our second trial knot in the right place i'll just point out that i'm trying to use the groove that the first trial created in the post to make sure that this wire is in exactly the same place i'm using the same coil of wire i'm using the same setup i'm even tying it off in the same directions so that i'm trying to minimize the amount of variance between each trial so we are actually testing the knots and just something that i've done a little bit different all right let's pump this one up once again this looks like it's broken in exactly the same place right as it crosses over the pigtail of the knot okay tightly tied knot number three here we go this time something a bit different the tightly tied knot broke in two places once where it goes over the wire for the first time and the other point where that crosses over the straight wire as it goes through the loop like it has in every other occasion now this is the real challenge of making this video i have to do a sloppy knot and that really goes against the grain but i'm going to now try and make this knot big and fat make the twists large and the whole point behind this is the radius of the curves has to be soft not tight like you'd expect in a neat knot let's see if it makes an appreciable [Music] difference [Music] that there is one sloppy knot it's tied the same it just looks like a two-year-old tied it let's see if it's any stronger okay sloppy knot mark one we've got our safety specs on i'm expecting i don't know what i'm expecting let's tighten her up and see what happens a fair bit of take-up happening there so there's a negative for fencing okay too sloppy it's actually as you can see slid down the wire it's undone this fence if it was hit by something if it was tied that badly would just lose all tension all right so here's our second iteration of the sloppy knot and you'll see that i've finished off the pigtail a little bit better but i've still left ample room here let's see if it suffers from the same fate and that is tightening up tightening up tightening up and just slipping slipping slipping it's not actually stronger what it's actually doing is allowing the wire on the fence to get a lot slacker before it actually takes up any tension and then i predict it will break at the same pressure [Applause] anyway so summing it all up what have we learned about end knots well we've learned that a neat one won't slip and lose line tension before it breaks but a sloppy one will and that's the whole job of the end knot is to hold your fence firmly in place and when something impacts against it not to move and allow the fence to get slack a sloppily tied one will do exactly that it will allow the fence to get slack but it does have a slightly higher braking tension to be honest with you an untidy badly tight end knot is not doing its primary job of keeping the fence together i hope you found this video interesting and if you did please don't forget hit the little subscribe button down there give it a thumbs up you've got no idea how much that helps the channel i can't wait to see you next week

Channel: Farm Learning with Tim Thompson

Views: 104,962

Keywords: Tim Thompson, how to, farm, adventure, fencing knots, farm fence, farm fencing, termination knot, end knot, wire, ht wire, how to fence, knot, knots, post fence, end

Id: -11qIdii-To

Length: 9min 24sec (564 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 01 2020