Messing with Ropes

Basically, this is an experiment to see what sort of loads are being generated in a short tight rope in my back garden.

I’m using all of my quite old rope access equipment.  This doesn’t get taken out very much as the rope is pretty old.  I wouldn’t use it for any height work.

I have a rope attached to two trees just over 5 m apart with one Broadweigh Blue shackle each end. One end has a Petzl stop fitted. To tension the rope, I used a Petzl shunt and five pulleys. See the pics below for the full horrific details!!

Before starting, I fitted one shackle and tensioned the rope pretty well with an alpine butterfly and a few half hitches to lock it off. I managed to get about 20 kg of tension in the rope.

I then fitted the above and managed to tension it to a held tension of 40-50 kg.  I got on at one end, walked along the rope and the tension went up to a peak of 130-150 kg. You can see the screenshots from the Broadweigh Blue app. 

I was also able to export the data from the graphs as csv files into Excel (one at a time) and then combine them into the attached spreadsheet. (See our latest update which gives this new function) You can see where I was tensioning the rope at 20, 40, 50 and 110 seconds and where I got onto the rope and walked along it from 135 seconds.

Link to XLS  Spreadsheet

I think there’s going to be a little more time in the coming weeks to do more things like this. Any slightly foolish ideas well received!!


Tom