How to Ascend a Rope Easily With the Prusik Knot - ITS Knot of the Week HD

hey guys welcome to imminent threat solutions and are not of the week in HD today we're going to be going through one of my favorite knots that I use all the time when I'm climbing and that's the prusik knot so let's get right into it okay so the first step in tying a prusik knot is actually to tie a double fisherman's knot so if you're familiar with that you're going to wrap across the line here and back through creating an X and I'm going to flip the line around and do the same thing on the other side so I'll cross over the standing part around and back through creating an X pattern and the knot and what I'm going to do when I have with my fisherman's knots is I'm going to pull the opposite side as you can see or on one piece of line here pull those together and on one side you'll see kind of a barrel knot or four different knot for different lines and on the other side you'll see what looks like two x's that's kind of your check to make sure that you've tied this correctly so once you have the the barrel knot on one side you're going to take the loop of the prusik and you're going to I'm sort of the loop of the static loop that you've created you're going to go around the line that you're going to be tying on to just like so you're going to wrap on the inside so that's one wrap spread these apart that's two wraps and now I'll do the same thing in shirring that stays on the inside that's three reps so again you want to make sure those wraps stay to the inside as you tighten them up and that's what the prusik looks like when it's on the line so you've got your double fisherman's here which creates your fixed loop and then it wraps around the line you're tying on to okay once you have your friction hitch tied on to the rope you can either use this as your visual check to ensure it's tied correctly or the other side too I'm a fan of both I can usually see both different directions to make sure I've got this tied correctly but you want to make sure that you don't put too many wraps in this obviously the more wraps the more friction it's going to create when you fall or you're you're arrested by the prusik if you fall so a good rule of thumb is three wraps that's what we did when we tied this so that's kind of what I use as my as my check is to make sure that I've got three wraps in the Prusa so technically what you want to do is make sure that you have a smaller dam or cordage in relation to your larger line so if this was a repel line I'd want to use a smaller diameter line that was not equal to the larger line so what I wouldn't want to do is use something like a paracord because that's way too small and I would never trust my life to paracord anyway so that's just a tip there make sure you're using a smaller diameter line that's not anything like paracord all right so the prusik is a friction hitch was which is an example of an auto block so it's going to slide freely during your controlled descent on something like a repel but will bind during a fall to stop your descent so the great thing about aproves ik as well is its unidirectional so if I was rappelling down this way and I was controlling the prusik with my support hand here and all of a sudden I fell it would bind just like that so same goes for the opposite direction if I was coming down this way a pull this way is going to bind that as well so with with the traditional ascender that you might use to ascend a rope they're usually unidirectional so the stop or the pull or rest of a sender would only be one direction that you couldn't do that both directions because that ascender is going to need to be pushed up as you're going up the rope so you can ascend with to Peru six and that's one of the benefits of these as well but just know that if there's too big of a variation between the diameter of the prusik and the diameter record edge it can slip one last thing about a prusik two is that it's not going to damage the rope versus an ascender or some device like that that can actually bite into the rope so that's an advantage of the prusik and again to rig this up while this isn't a demonstration for rappelling what you do is you'd actually clip in to your harness with a carabiner onto this end of the prusik and you might want to change this up a little bit so if we adjusted this and all I'm doing is changing the direction here so basically that that barrel knot or the the double fisherman's knot is right is not right in the direction of where my carabiner would be you never want to hook up a carabiner directly on that double fisherman's knot so that would be hooked up to my harness then as I'm rappelling along the line here I would be controlling the prusik either pressing it down like this with my control hand as I'm coming down the rope and then if anything happened and I fell it would arrest my fall like this into my harness so that's just an example of usage on the prusik knot hey guys thanks for watching this will be our last time of the week for 2015 be sure to check back in 2016 every Tuesday for the night of the week in HD thanks again

Channel: ITS Tactical / Imminent Threat Solutions

Views: 1,399,210

Rating: 4.8025246 out of 5

Keywords: Knots, Knot Tying, KOTW, Knot of the Week, Knot of the Week HD, ITS Tactical, Imminent Threat Solutions, Hitches, Hitch, Prusik, Prusik Knot, Ascending, Prusiking, Rope Ascending

Id: DJvk4GnNA74

Length: 6min 19sec (379 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2015