Fast passing of the knot for rappelling or lowering

a friction knot is exceptionally easy to release, just use it with a mariners or a MMO

as to rapping on munters ... dont do it unless you absolutely have no choice, or you want twisted ropes

most folks cant remember how to properly escape a belay, never mind various specialty knot passes that only work with certain conditions

learn and practice the one that basically works with any device and in any condition

KISS ...

btw ... i still cant make head or tails of how yr system works

;)

You don't have to leave the prussik or the overhand in the rope if continuing. You can easily let more slack out on the one side and slack the prussik (google Irata rope access knot passing rescue)

Why not buy a tibloc and call it a day?

Why are you rapping on a munter? If you have to tie a second munter, is it that much faster than a prussik? (why not stand in a rope loop to unweight the friction hitch?)

How fast have you done this technique and how fast can you make the widely used technique if you practiced?

Why is a bachmann unacceptable on a single strand? I spend 40-80 hours a week on ropes and never once not trusted a bachmann to hold me or a load as long as it is tied properly. If it were to fail, it would also be stopped by whatever knot is in the rope.

If speed is what you are looking for, I can name about 3 super sketchy (if not properly performed) techniques that I do not feel comfortable having someone try out via internet instructions.

Like I said before there are 1,000 ways to skin a cat and I guess there is a 1 in 1,000,000 chance that you would have to use your method. But I don't see the 5 extra seconds ending in disaster.

Thanks for the reference. Looking at it in detail, I think that I have seen it represented before but I don't think that I had ever tried it. Having tried it now a few times, I can't see how it can be rigged so the prusik stays within reach to be retrieved after the knot-pass. You have to leave the loop big enough to allow loosening and retrieving of the 3rd-hand and the ATC. By the time you've let the rope straighten itself out again by letting out the prusik's MMO, the prusik is quite out of reach. After seeing that in the first test, I did tests 2 to 5 specifically trying to keep everything as tight as possible but no dice.

These tests were done in my stairwell since winter has finally arrived in Montreal. As a result, it was a bit hard to tell but it also looked like it would have been touch and go to be able to reach the prusik by simply stepping into a loop of rope. In order to keep the rebelay PMMO loop small and stay as close as possible to the prusik, the biner for the munter used as a second brake was clipped directly to my harness and it would have prevented me from stepping up much more than 6-7 in., which may have just barely let me reach the prusik... or not. If not, I would have had to use yet another prusik to step up on just to pull down the other one! Plus, as I mentioned earlier, there are situations in climbing self-rescue when stepping up is simply not an option. I suppose that this is where you could use a bachmann, instead of a prusik. A sling could be clipped in the bachmann's biner and used to pull it down. With a tibloc, as with a prusik, the only choice would be to step up (one way or the other) or leave it behind.

I clearly don't have your familiarity with the bachmann but my experience with it has been a bit patchy. Most of the time it works well but every now and then it slips. When it just plain fails to grab the rope, it's most likely the same thing as when any other friction hitch fails to grab: wrong diameter ratio of cord vs rope and/or suppleness of the cord, not enough pre-tightening, etc. But sometimes the bachmann just slips slowly and continuously while fully tightened and under load, which is not something I've seen other friction hitches do (at least not with the same rope and cord combination). If there's something I missed in bachmann 101 (biner compatibility or whatever) and it can be explained over the internet, I'd love to hear what it is. Anyway, as it is, I don't trust it 100% and, since I don't usually need the biner handle, I've pretty much let the bachmann sift to the bottom of the self-rescue toolbox.

Now there are a couple of bits about your technique that still don't make sense. The first one, again, is the "overhand": the youtube video that showed the technique in detail used an alpine buttefly and left the whole loop (closed by this butterfly and a basic ascender) behind on the rope. A simple overhand with the PMMO's biner clipped through it, or an overhand on a bight would not be cleanable since that knot is holding full body weight. So just what is this "overhand" that can be undone under high tension?

The second bit is that thing you said earlier about "clipping into the Belly with a Biner to allow you to do the knot-pass with one ATC and no munter", which is what I was trying to wrap my head around when I first tried to make sense of your diagram. I still don't see how that is possible since you need that loop to stay loose and your weight to be on the other side of it to be able to loosen and remove the ATC and 3rd-hand. I suppose that that weight transfer biner could be clipped to the same "overhand" as the PMMO biner instead of the loop. If that can somehow be undone completely under load, it might free both biners at once.

In any case, as I anticipated, this method seems to take at least as much time as the more standard knot-passing methods. If there is no great urgency and no risk of clusterf*#% in leaving the loop-closing friction hitch behind, it would be pretty competitive with the standard methods timewise and, as you point out, it is indeed quite smooth. If you can describe or provide links for faster methods, great, but if not, talking about them without providing info would not be particularly helpful. In any case it's not a 5 sec. difference between the standard methods and the EDK munter pass-through. Even at its slowest (with the 2nd munter weight transfer), as I said above, it's more like 30 to 40 sec., which, under dire circumstances, very much fits the definition of a "significant difference" in my book. Threading a second munter and then letting it unwind by itself as you continue rappelling is indeed significantly faster than setting up, letting out and undoing a PMMO.

If you do it properly you ahouldnt have to step up to recover the friction hitches

And if you have cord you can always do this little trick

;)

• sigh *

Yes, bear, if you do a standard knot pass properly you shouldn't need to step up to recover the prusik but PosiDave's IRATA knot-passing technique is a different animal. By the time you've fully straightened out the rope loop, you've let out almost a metre of the PMMO prusik cord through its munter and your harness loop is now well over a metre from the prusik. So it's out of reach unless you're particularly tall or have particularly long arms, long torso or both.

Of course you can use an autoblock instead of a prusik. It would have to be configured to let you do close to a metre of smooth lowering under load. Various options are possible but the more practical one I can think of is to do the autoblock wraps on a short cord loop and clip its two ends into a longer loop that will do the MMO part of the system.

The autoblock loosens very readily and, once you've straightened out the rope and released the tension, it will most likely just pop loose on its own and slide down the rope to you, which sounds great for this application. However, this all-too-easy release property of the autoblock is the reason why I trust it even less than the bachmann for self-rescue applications.

jktinst wrote: ...Now there are a couple of bits about your technique that still don't make sense. The first one, again, is the "overhand"... A simple overhand with the PMMO's biner clipped through it, or an overhand on a bight would not be cleanable since that knot is holding full body weight. So just what is this "overhand" that can be undone under high tension? The second bit is that thing you said earlier about "clipping into the Belly with a Biner to allow you to do the knot-pass with one ATC and no munter",... I still don't see how that is possible since you need that loop to stay loose and your weight to be on the other side of it to be able to loosen and remove the ATC and 3rd-hand...

While I was pining over the fact that PosiDave seems to have abandoned this discussion and that it seemed increasingly unlikely that I would get answers to the two questions above, I had a minor "aha!" moment: why not use an overhand on a bight except that instead of doing it on the rope below the knot, do it on one of the knot's tails? Man, those tails sure are coming handy for all sorts of knot-passing tricks!

I just tried it and it works quite well. Here is an outline of the whole knot-pass:
- use an overhand (or fig8) on a bight on one of the tails to anchor the biner for the loop-closing friction hitch-munter-mule-overhand (using something recoverable from an out-of-reach position for the friction hitch, as discussed below)
- install the munter and 3rd-hand on rope2
- loosen and remove the 3rd-hand and the ATC from the loop on rope1, completing your weight transfer to rope2
- undo the mule-overhand and let out the friction hitch's munter until the loop on rope1 is straightened out and the friction hitch is no longer under tension
- recover and remove the friction hitch, remove the MMO's biner and undo the bight on the tail
et voilà: you can resume rappelling, leaving nothing on the rope.

I have no idea if this is what PosiDave had in mind but it's certainly a viable option. It would also work for the "one-ATC-and-no-munter" option: with a tether from the harness loop to the MMO biner on the tail bight, you would transfer your weight to the biner when removing the ATC from the loop. You would then install the ATC on the second rope and transfer your weight to it when you let out the friction hitch's munter.

Regarding the recoverable friction hitch, in addition to the bachmann and autoblock mentioned earlier, there are all the other "carabiner knots" described on Gary Storrick's fascinating site (that Gregger Man reminded me about in an unrelated discussion - thanks Gregger Man), all of which are recoverable either because they will loosen and slide down when no longer under tension or because they can be pulled down with a separate cord attached/clipped to the biner. I'd need to do a lot more testing to identify one that I would trust as much as the classic prusik but it's certainly worth a try.

For a fast knot-pass, I still like the EDK munter pass-through a lot but there'll definitely be room in the toolbox for this version of the IRATA knot-pass once I've hit on the right recoverable friction hitch.

Pretty sure now you are on the road I was talking about.

There are indeed a bunch of other knots that people don't consider "climbing safe" since they are easy to it tie right.

With practice you can figure 100 different ways to modify the knot passing I sent over. I also tried the way you mentioned. Not really sure if it was 100% accurate. But it did seem to work. I just never really tie an EDK haha.

Too long. Just use a Prusik.