Weak to be strong
Hello,
The trick with soft shackles is to create a toggle without using the dog bones or barrels that other HM shackles do. This means tying some form of knot (a button or lanyard knot), and that necessarily means drastically weakening the rope where the knot is tied.
To compensate for this lack of strength, a soft shackle doubles the mass of rope that goes into forming the knot. Maybe there is some button or lanyard knot which would weaken the rope less, but meanwhile we have a simple, cheap structure at least 1.1 times the strength of the rope it was made from. I'd say that was a really good deal.
Fair leads,
Brion Toss
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