How to tie a timber hitch

Description

In this video i show how to tie a timber hitch, a knot which as it gets tighter, its grip on a peice of wood gets tighter

Tags: YouTube Editor,bushcraft,survival,Bear Grylls (Author),ray mears,Timber Hitch,Survival Skills (TV Genre),Camping (Taxonomy Subject)

Video Transcription

hi guys got another not for you today another part of the daily knock thing that I've been doing and today what I'm gonna be showing you is the timber hitch timber hitch is a really fascinating knot it appears when you're first doing it to be quite a loose knot doesn't seem like it's got much use the interesting thing about the timber hitch is the tighter you pull it the harder its grip on the piece of wood or whatever you tie it around get it's really simple to do once you've got the got the grip of it so I'm just gonna angle camera now for you to go back to my usual branch that I used to show you the timber hitch it's a really quick simple one okay some of you tie it to this it simply hits really simple so you get your working ends your loose end in one hand and then get your long then which is this bit here going out of the way so all you need to do is bring your working end around your piece of wood and then wrap it around your long end so you've got this loop then taking your working end you want to be wrapping it around this top piece so don't wrap it around a loose end you want to make a little loop around your working end so it comes through that's just thinking so you can so you can see that this or this working end goes down around itself so bring it around so it makes a full loop pull the loop around itself and then tuck it underneath itself again and do this three times three times it seems to work just about right so there you go and just push those coils up on themselves now these coils are really important because what they do particularly if you're working with a big piece of water or a big piece of wood a big piece of rope sorry these coils actually kind of bite onto and grip the piece of wood now you can tighten the timber hitch just by pulling it around in itself and then pull this working end back and the tighter you pull it so let's give that a really good tight pull the tighter you pull that I don't know whether you can make out it's actually starting to bite into this wood here so tight you pull it - its grip get so it might not seem particularly I can't pull that tight properly this is a very very tight tight rope it's great if you're doing a guy liner something like that so you can tie this off at the other end using the clove hitch or your round turn and two half hitches or something like that and another thing a lot about this once you loosen it off just pull that out comes undone really easily now this knot was traditionally used for hauling logs and timber over land using by horses and things more modern times I think they use chains for this so I'm just gonna show you that again really quickly so get your working end take it around your piece of wood wrap it around the long end so make a loop and then start - my hand is in the way there so just work with my other hand then start to wrap it underneath itself just like so you can pull that tight I isn't going anywhere

see I'm pulling the whole lot with it so there you go that's your timber hitch for you okay well worth practicing this will really hand a little one to know one thing you can't do with this is or at least I've never tried to anyway because it seems like it wouldn't work you couldn't tie something like a guyline with a timber hitch at both ends because you do need to be able to pull one end tight to make this not effective so you could tie one side with your timber hitch which means that you're not going to have loads of loose stuff dangling down but then you need to find another knot to tie the other end off with and the next up I'm going to show you tomorrow hopefully it's gonna be things called a slippery hitch knot which is great for that because that's another one that you can tighten up and it's also a quick release knot okay works great with the timber hitch thanks for watching guys