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I climb on ice-tail. I love it...
If you look at the Samson splicing instructions it calls for a long bury and an overlap in the center. I would like to avoid this if possible.
Both splices would also be lock stitched when done!!
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I will catch hell for saying this, but I believe in putting out the facts and letting others make of them what they will. I think Samson is crazy (or just lazy) to apply their standard Class-2 instructions to Ice Tail (IT) for the reason that the specifications are grossly over-conservative.
Last year I pulled an IT splice to failure. My intent was not to break it, but to make the splice so short that it was sure to pull apart and I would learn something about pulling force vs bury length. I intended to do a number of such pulls to create a nice chart relating splice security to bury length. For the first test I chose a ridiculously short bury of 2 inches. Of course there was no Brummel and no stitching. The experiment was ruined when the rope broke at the end of the bury at 8000 lbs.
My current IT e2e's have buries of about 7 or 8 inches, no Brummels, but plenty of stitching at the throat. I am sure I could lift a pair of trucks with either one.
If I wanted to make a still shorter splice, I would use a locking Brummel and a bury of 4 inches and feel perfectly safe. If the bury were to somehow come out, the Brummel would then be left holding the load. A Brummel with a 4-inch tail is not going to rip the tail apart, so the Brummel would hold until it breaks.
What force would it take to break the Brummel? I have done several tests in hollow braids, including the Vectran core of Bee-Line. The Brummel is about equivalent to a very bad knot, reducing the rope strength to about 30% to 35% of nominal. In a line as strong as IT, that would still be enough to rip a person in half.
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