Animated Knots by Grog™

 

All about knots: This website pages contain descriptions and animations on tying some of the most common knots, including: bowline knots, half hitch knot, overhand knot, hitch knot and many more!

All the knots listed here are almost necessary for each scout even they they are not all required for gaining ranks.

Knots are intertwined loops of rope, cord, string or other flexible material, used to fasten two such ropes to one another or to another object.

Knots, Bends, Hitches, Splices and Seizings are all ways of fastening cords or ropes, either to some other object such as a spar, or a ring, or to one another. The knot is formed to make a knob on a rope, generally at the extremity, and by untwisting the strands at the end and weaving them together. But it may be made by turning the rope on itself through a loop, as for instance, the overhand knot.

A bend and a hitch are ways of fastening or tying ropes together, as in the Carrick bend or round spars as the Studding Sail Halyard Bend and the Timber Hitch.

A splice is made by untwisting two rope ends and weaving them together.

A seizing is made by fastening two spars to one another by a rope, or two ropes by a third, or by using one rope to make a loop on another, as for example the Racking Seizing, the Round Seizing, and the Midshipman's Hitch. The use of the words is often arbitrary. There is, for instance, no difference in principle between the Fisherman's Bend and the Timber Hitch.

 

Speaking generally, the Knot and the Seizing are meant to be permanent, and must be unwoven in order to be unfastened, while the Bend and Hitch can be undone at once by pulling the ropes in the reverse direction from that in which they are meant to hold. Yet the Reef Knot can be cast loose with ease, and is wholly different in principle, for instance, from the Diamond Knot. These various forms of fastening are employed in many kinds of industry, as for example in scaffolding, as well as in seamanship. The governing principle is that the strain which pulls against them shall draw them tighter. The ordinary knots and splices are described in every book on seamanship.