Quote:
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Originally Posted by Tree Doc In the spirit of that Toyota Commercial where the little kids are in the lab with the engineer that's crash testing Toyotas....."Do the purple one, Bob!"
Knot-Doc, do the double uni....do the double uni!  |
That was a GREAT commercial!
Ok, by popular request, the purple one...
First, I ran out of line on my reference spool. Fortunately, Friday was payday, so I picked up a new spool of same brand Izor 40#.
I re-tied some reference knots to make sure the new spool was comparable to the old one:
5 Overhand knots:
29.5 28 29 29.5 29.5
/x = 29.1# vs spool1 31.9#
S = .652# vs spool1 1.853#
5 figure 8 surgeon's loops:
37.5 33 37.5 34 34
/x = 35.2# vs spool1 36.3#
S = 2.139# vs spool1 1.874#
So, the same knots on spool2 came in 1-2# weaker.
The results of the fig8 sugeon's loops from spool1 and spool2 were closer,
so I'll choose to normalize the data against this knot assuming it's representing 85% of
the original true line strength for each spool.
Spool1's true line strength was estimated to be 42.5#, this puts spool2 at 41.4#.
Now that we have a reference, the double uni (a.k.a. uni-to-uni) splice:
25.5 24.5 23.5 27.5 22.5 30 25 19 19 19 19.5 22.5 19.5 23 23 21.5 21.5 25 21 22
/x=22.7#
S=2.962#
= 54.83% original line strength +/- 7.15%
And, a couple other splice knots to compare it against:
Blood Knot:
27.5 19.5 27.5 25 33 26 17 21 15 19.5 19 19.5 20.5 16.5 18.5
/x=21.667#
S=5.017#
= 52.33% original line strength +/- 12.12%
Seaguar Knot:
25 26.5 29 25 22.5 30 25 21.5 28.5 26
/x=25.9#
S=2.726#
= 62.56% original line strength +/- 6.58%
The uni-uni and blood knots were tied using 5 turns for each side.
The seaguar knot was tied with 3 twists to the loop, then the leader side fed through. I was simply splicing a short length of the same 40# izor onto itself, so these results are for splicing 2 lines of the same diameter.
Sadly, as with so many things in life, that with the tightest, best looking body proved to be the least reliable.
The uni-uni was suprisingly only slightly stronger than the blood knot, but does appear to be more reliable. I took so many samples because I was really suprised that it wasn't coming in stronger than this. It was strange to see what I thought to be my best tied blood knots, which cinched down with the smallest and tightest wraps, were the weakest ones to break.
The tag ends of the blood knot stick straight out from the standing line, while the tag ends of the uni-uni lie flatter. This can be good or bad.
Even though they lie flatter, they form a better hook to catch weeds or rod guides. It's important to trim the tag ends of the uni-uni close.
The blood knot needs a little more tag end left on, as it is more vulnerable to slipping.
The structure of the blood knot is simpler than uni-uni, but it's a little trickier to tie. The uni-uni is tied as 2 separate knots, the only trick being to know just how tight each separate uni should be cinched down before cinching them together. The blood knot requires keeping tension on 2 standing ends and 2 tag ends until the whole thing can be tightened down, requiring a bit more finger gymnastics.
The seaguar is really simple to tie, unless you have a too long a length of line to feed through the loop created in the knot's construction. (You probably don't want to have to feed 100yds of topshot through the knot to tie it!). But, if you're splicing a heavy leader of similar diameter it seems to be the way to go.
For tying on a topshot, or otherwise splicing 2 long lengths of line, the uni-uni should be compared to a bimini twist/albright.
I'll aslo try some surgeon's knot splices to see how they weigh in.
Until next time...
