NOTE: there are a few images in the thread below showing the working prototypes of the knot. This is the final Ossa Hitch.
I’d like to think that I know how to tie a few knots by now, which is sometimes more of a curse than a blessing as this story illustrates. To minimize indecisions, I more or less settled on a small set of knots that would consistently work in most situations, as I’m sure others have done.
For object hitches, this is #398/#1809 (which I’ll not name, as the names do this knot a disservice, suggesting only an esoteric use or mixing it up with another slipped hitch, when in fact it’s an excellent general-use and unique hitch, useful for tying a cord to any object, that is solid and never jammed on me). If the final slip is not desired (the previous knot doesn’t work well unslipped), I tie the Gnat, which is a rope-efficient and I believe secure hitch, but it is sometimes hard to untie.
Yet the curiosity got the better of me and, following Dan Lehman’s suggestion, I tried the two hitches shown below. Both of them are basically the Ossel hitch but tied not on the object itself, but rather on the standing part of the rope already passed around a spar or through a ring. There are two versions of it: one with the tail going away from the object (A) and the other with the tail going towards it (B).
Version A seems to jam every time I look at it, so it’s no good. But version B seems to be working quite well. When you look at it closely, in addition to being an iteration of the Ossel hitch, it is also quite similar to the Gnat (at least the first 3/4 of it), differing from it by the final tuck. It uses a little bit more rope, but that provides more rope-on-rope friction with a gentler but full-turn last crossing? wrap around the Spart, an interesting tail nipping?, and the tail squeezed against the object when taut, which gives hope for slack resistance and ease of untying (the two side-by-side wraps on the standing part can be relatively easily pried apart to loosen the knot when untying it - a somewhat similar idea to untying the #1809).
Would anyone be familiar with it and/or perhaps could double-check if this hitch has any promise?
While I’m playing with the B knot, there may be a variant of it that looks promising. It may look like applying ‘if you don’t know how to tie a knot, tie a lot!’, but it’s just a u-turn of the tail through the outer nipping loop that is added. Now both nipping loops are larger, holding 2 ropes, the rest of the construct doesn’t really change (still can pry the nipping loops apart to loosen the knot), and the tail exits parallel to the standing part. A little like the S-Lock (woven) Bowline for fixed loops (the final u-turn/tuck for the hitch can be also done in the opposite direction, to weave the tail even better, but I find it to be too much).
I’m pretty sure that such a knot is secure enough, it’s also not that difficult to tie quickly, but it’s the jamming propensity that is a question. Would anyone be willing to try to jam it - I do, but possibly not hard enough?
Both version A and B of your Ossel Hitch to the Standing Part would seem to benefit from a more secure form of the Ossel Hitch. Try [ABoK #273, see also 274] which seems to work better than the even more complex variant at http://igkt-solent.co.uk/ossel-hitch/ rather than the extra tuck you suggest.
I wouldn’t also be concerned about the security of your Ossa Hitch, (i’m refering to your Beta version with the extra tuck presented at reply#1), with this double overhand, returning binder, tied around the SPart, but i hold that jamming would be an issue for heavy loading.
Think of the returning structure as a barrel knot, where the SPart passes down through the first turn.
This is actually the difference between this knot and the poacher’s.
One should state the needs for your hitch.
Is it to be a ring, spar, or pile hitch? (IMO,
the first is likely to take a noose-hitch, there
being so little real estate of a “ring” to hitch
to --as in the OP, the line passes through the
ring (that’s the extent of “hitching” to the object)
and a hitch is made to the line.)
Now, a plus in such noose-hitching to a ring is
that the tail of the hitch can be tucked between
the knot and the ring and then noosed into place.
The treatment of commercial-fishing knots looks
not so great in common literature. That #274
to bind head-/ground-lines together wouldn’t
be done in small bits as shown,
but would be a continued wrapping & binding
in a lonnnng line around the object ropes
–and suitable to putting in mostly w/o tucking!
Consider Ashley’s #3794 :: he shows this for
working edges of netting, and has it tied in much
the direction of a groundline hitch; in fact, it’s
put in the obviously easy and not PITA way by
working in the opposite-to-Ashley direction :
cast a HH to pull tight, then in reverse direction
another HH to lock that into the RGH, and continue.
In some cases I’ve seen, “continue” means building
the immediate binder with further cast HHs; in others,
the minimal knot suffices, and one helically wraps away
down the bound lines until putting in the next binder
–some cases it’s just big binder to big binder, a short
connecting line is all that runs a short span between !
(I think that there are some photos in the InTheWild
thread.)
An alternative to the Gnat which would share its nice properties but stay in place (cinch and limit sideways sliding, similar to the Poacher’s/Scaffold or Anchor bend) on things like biners better and be (even) easier to untie, even at the expense of eating a little more rope. I’m not sure how it compares jamming-wise yet.
I tried to compare the ease of untying of the Gnat vs. Ossa The Final - version B with the final tuck (is there a better name for it?). Nothing super extreme but some 100 kgf on a 6 mm polyester cord (probably some 700 kgf MBS) with the hitches on small karabiners.
They are both untiable (as in ‘able to be untied’) by hand after such load, but the Ossa seems significantly easier to untie. I think this is because of this sequence of untying for the Ossa:
Bend the outer nipping loop away from the object - seems easy to do as this loop doesn’t see that much load.
This makes it relatively easy to remove the tail from it.
Now the outer nipping loop has some slack as there is only a single Spart left inside it. Use this slack to loosen/enlarge the inner nipping loop and to untie the knot.
Did anyone try to jam it or load it seriously and see how it compares to the Gnat jamming-wise?
I did a single test with dry, approx. 4 mm braided nylon, both ends attached to a single link with a cross-sectional diameter of .38 inch. I then did some cyclical seated heel raises to seriously strain the line.
Your version B took 3:25 to untie. The wrap around the standing part took a while to pry loose, but it also took some time to loosen the underlying half hitch. The Gnat Hitch took 0:35 to untie. Here, most of my time was taken loosening the underlying half hitch.
Hmmm… I had a different experience - need to do it again. Isn’t the ‘underlying half hitch’ against the object similar to the underlying half hitch in the Gnat? Why the one in the Gnat was easier to untie, you think?
I suspect that the tucked (final) version of the Ossa may prove to be easier to untie, owing to two ropes inside the outer nipping loop. The outer nipping loop is now larger, softer, and easier to pry/bend in order to release the tail and, once this is done, it provides the slack helpful in untying the inner nipping loop, and thus the knot.
In the Gnat there is no such slack, but the tail enters the inner nipping loop from the opposite direction, having been likely under higher tension not reduced by the outer nipping loop friction - I’m not quite sure what that means for the ease of untying.
I’m trying to determine how easy it is to untie the Ossa after load, using the Gnat as a benchmark. The test is hardly sophisticated, but I think useful enough to form an informed opinion:
I’m repeatedly sitting/jumping on a sling supported from above by a single 6 mm polyester cord hitched to a small (about 7 mm dia) biner and then try to untie the hitch from the biner. Given that this cord has probably around 700 kgf MBS and that I weigh some 100 kgf, that should expose the hitches to some 100-200 kgf cyclical tension (about zero fall factor) which is a reasonably high working load for such a cord.
I’ll report once I’m done with it, but for now I can say that while both hitches become quite solid and not that pleasant to remove, the Ossa takes consistently less time and effort to untie as compared to the Gnat.
Roo (and maybe other people, especially those that have proper rigs to tension the hitches to perhaps even higher values), would you like to reproduce it but using the final version of the Ossa (the one with the final tail tuck through the outer nipping loop, as illustrated above) as this, in addition to increasing the Ossa’s security, definitely helps in loosening the hitch (the recipe for loosening the Ossa is in one of the previous posts)?
The only other explanation (other than Roo testing a different, prototype version of the Ossa) that I can think of for the difference between what I’m finding and what Roo reported is that my polyester cord is probably less stretchy than Roo’s nylon, but I’m not sure how that could help the Gnat to jam less (or the Ossa to jam more).
NB, by one of the (unspecified, naturally --it’s H&G!) loadings
of EKFR (“Hensel & Gretel”), #51, pl.25, p.64 (left end loading)
is just this : Gnat H. ; other end, the better? Eskimo BWL.
I think I figured out what Dan is saying - there is indeed a knot in the Encyclopedia of Knots and Fancy Rope Work that when loaded by one end forms the Gnat Hitch and when loaded by the other forms the Eskimo Bowline (attached). They call it ‘the crossed overhand loop’, but don’t specify the use for it.
Dan, would you like to try to jam the Gnat and the Ossa and see how they work for you?
