How to Tie a Square Knot

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Harold Winchester, and today I'm going to teach you how to tie a square knot. Now you can do this one of two ways. You can do it the wrong way, and then you can do it the right way. And I'll show you what I mean. What we're going to do is, we're gonna...two working ends of rope here. And what I'm going to do is, I'm going to lay one over like so, and I'm just basically going to do what'll be considered just an overhand knot. Now, I want to do the same thing again. So if I take this one, lay this over, wrap it over and under, as you can see here, I've got both loops. This one's coming under, or under, under, under, again, and this one's going over, over, over. When you pull 'em together, you get your proper square knot. Now if you do this the other way, what you'll get is this knot, which is a....I can't remember the name of this knot, but this is not correct. This is not the correct square knot. So what we're going to do is, is we're going to undo these again, like so, and we'll just go over, like that, and then just basically repeat that pattern again. Over, wrap under, like...oops...I did it wrong. There we go. You're proper square knot. So, this is great whenever you want to put two pieces of rope together, and make sure they're going to hold. This will take a lot of tension, and it shouldn't break. But, like with every knot, this is only going to be like a forty to sixty percent knot, meaning that this knot will actually decrease the weight value of your rope line by sixty percent. So be careful if you're going to use this on any real...like repelling application or anything like this. This is not a proper knot for that. But for anything else, just holding things down, it'll work fine. So, I'm Harold once again, and this is me tying a square knot."