Glow-in-the-dark paracord? Nope.

[Craig Frank]

A few weeks ago I ordered 100' of luminescent white paracord. I was going to make a black and white whip with it. The whip I'm finishing now is red and white for a retiring co-worker who likes the Arizona Cardinals. I used regular white on his, but I wanted to do the knots in the luminescent white. After finishing the heel knot, I can say, to quote Robby, "never more". It is way too flimsy. I knew something was up when I saw that the guts had nine strands. That's because the shell is so thin and slick. It melts like wax. When you gut it and use it, its width reduces by about 25-35%. I had to do for passes on the heel knot because it was so thin and it still didn't fill it all up. And it wouldn't stay in place because it is so floppy. After rolling, it came out ehh..., but I'm not happy with it. I'm going to leave it on because the glow-in-the-dark part is cool, but it's definitely not a knot that I'm happy with. I'm going to stick to normal white for the transition knot. Now I'm stuck with about 90' of worthless, expensive paracord. Maybe I'll make bracelets out of it.

[Lasse Carenvall]

Actually, I don´t think the material is all of the explanation. Thin and flimsy stuff makes it hard, but not impossible. As far as I can see on your heel knot you have 4 bights and what looks like 3 leads – is that correct?

This gives few and large faces of the knot, which means more and longer strands on each face. This in turn inevitably means it is a lot harder for the material to get fixed in place, and if it is a bit slippery it gets really bad. Then it tends to separate, slip around and be generally problematic.

I think the idea of glow-in-the-dark is really cool, too cool to be discarded. Give it a try with a knot that has more faces, say a 5 or 7 lead. 4 bights close very neatly, so you might want to keep that. For heel knots I am very partial to Little Lump Knot, aka LLK. It gives more faces and the end is braided over to close very well.

So, my advice would be to try another knot, Before you give up on the glow-in-the-dark cord!

[Craig Frank]

Lasse,
Thank you for the advice. The knot here may look half way decent, but the threads are pretty loose and the top is a garbled mess due to having to go four passes instead of only three. I 'll try some more in the future and maybe I can make it work, but I'm concerned about the cord never getting settled right in the knot so that it doesn't move around during use. Honestly, the only reason I left it on is because I know the recipient will only put it on the wall.

[Guest]

It really does look like the knot is not pulled tight all the way, which is something that presents the problem better. Looks like the first and last pass are tighter than the two between them, at least judging by the width of the strands. And compared to the strand width in the handle braid it seems that the GITD cord is considerably more narrow when pulled tight. The size and quality of civilian grade paracord varies very wildly between manufacturers and even colors, and it seems that the stuff you got there represents the extremes.

I second what Lasse said -- he's the resident knot guru of the forum, so that happens a lot -- about the lead and bight count. A 7 lead 6 bight turk's head with two passes might do the trick here, so there's no real reason to ditch the glow in the dark effect alltogether. There was a discussion once about calculating the optimal lead and bight count for a foundation of a given size. If you like it when people think aloud with math, check it out here: viewtopic.php?id=2571

As a general tip, it's very useful to learn tying a 5 lead 4 bight and expanding it to a 7 lead 6 bight. In addition to the 4 lead 3 bight you seem to know already, those will make up for a turk's head arsenal that will suit most of your whip knot needs. There are very good tutorials on youtube for those two knots.


- Pokkis