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posted by martyb on Wednesday November 09 2016, @07:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the handy! dept.

One of the sources suggested in our Meta conversation yesterday (State of the Soylent: Community Roundtable) was the physics blog Cocktail Party Physics, which had this neat video, How to Cut String with Your Bare Hands in it.

It's reminiscent of the sort of thing Mythbusters liked to reveal.

Thanks to tonyPick!


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09 2016, @09:16AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09 2016, @09:16AM (#424446)

    what is needed is a transcript or better yet a summary

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday November 09 2016, @12:43PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 09 2016, @12:43PM (#424570)

    This (mostly) only works with synthetic (modern) sailing rope, you tie each end of the rope to something sturdy (two trees, fat persons legs, you get the idea) and pull it tight and get a second perhaps 5 foot or so length of rope and loop it thru the first piece of rope once. Then you pull back and force as fast and hard as you can on alternating ends of the second rope. Half the frictional heat of pulling the rope ends up across 5 feet of the second rope which is moving thru the air fast so it stays quite cool, and the other half the frictional heat stays in one spot of the unmoving first rope rapidly making enough heat to melt thru it. I suppose with non-synthetic traditional manilla rope it might just abrade thru, but if you're using that you're probably on a museum piece like the USS Constitution from the 1700s and you should be doing stuff the right way not half assing it.

    I have to admit I never heard such a thing although it seems obvious in retrospect. I have Toss's first and second edition of sailboat rigging techniques and there's some crazy stuff in there for insane emergency procedures but weirdly enough I couldn't find this madness in either edition of the book last night. If its not in Toss, its either crazy exotic or doesn't exist or isn't worth knowing, so its surprising this technique exists at all. There is learning in the field, the first edition of Toss was from the 80s (or thats when I bought it anyway) and the relatively recent second edition has some small amount of new stuff so I guess its believable that something sailors don't know about rope exists or was recently invented. I'm just saying the average sailor has never heard of this craziness although how it works seems ridiculously obvious after about 3 seconds of viewing.

    Other than sailors, the only other people using "old fashioned" rope rigging techniques that I know of, are the BDSM bondage crowd and I have no idea if this technique of cutting rope is well known in that community or not.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09 2016, @04:33PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09 2016, @04:33PM (#424719)

      Thanks for the summary.

      So in other words, one can crudely 'saw' rope using another piece of rope as a friction device. This is like how I 'cut' a coat hanger in half by bending the wire back & forth 100 times until it heats up & snaps.

      Article's title should be renamed to exclude the word 'cut'.

      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Friday November 11 2016, @01:37PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 11 2016, @01:37PM (#425664)

        That would be a fatigue failure and its not temp dependent. Rope doesn't fail in fatigue you can bend it back and forth all day.

    • (Score: 1) by rst on Thursday November 10 2016, @03:27AM

      by rst (2175) on Thursday November 10 2016, @03:27AM (#424981)

      I don't know much about sailing, but I learned this technique to cut the strings off of hay bales with another piece of twine more years ago than I care to admit.