About TyingPoint

TyingPoint started from a simple frustration: most knot references online are organized purely around a knot's name, which only helps if you already know what it's called. In practice, almost nobody starts there — they start with a real problem sitting in front of them and only learn the knot's actual name afterward, if ever. This site is built task-first for that reason, with the full alphabetical directory kept as a secondary way in for anyone who already knows the name.

The second thing this site set out to fix is honesty about strength and security. A lot of knot content treats every knot in its list as equally trustworthy for any job, which simply isn't true — some knots retain far more of a rope's rated strength than others, some work loose under repeated loading in a way others don't, and some are genuinely wrong tools for a job even though they'll technically hold a rope together. Every knot page here states, plainly, an honest strength-and-security note: an approximate percentage of retained strength where a real figure exists, specific security notes about how the knot actually behaves under load, and specific cautions about where it shouldn't be trusted.

The third difference is how the tying itself is taught: as a rotatable 3D model of the rope, alongside a numbered sequence written for that knot's actual mechanics. Flat line drawings were tried twice and withdrawn twice — most recently in September 2026 — because a drawing has to fake depth, and a knot is defined by which strand passes over which. A model does not have that problem: the crossings come out of the geometry rather than being decided by whoever drew it. 99 of the 100 knots now carry one. The methodology page explains that decision in full, along with how the facts behind each knot are researched and checked.

TyingPoint is built and maintained independently, without a large editorial staff behind it. That keeps things simple: no rotating bylines, no syndicated content, just a single, consistent standard applied across all 100 knots, 20 tasks, 7 activities, and 30 comparisons on the site. Where the site falls short of that standard — a knot that's missing, a fact that needs correcting — the contact page is the fastest way to flag it.