Monkey fist tightness

I'm building a set of monkey fist fire poi and wanted to know just how tight the knots should be? Does anyone have any experience with how tight either purchased or self-built heads should be? Thanks,
Brian

when I make them i get a flat head screw driver under each loop on each side and pull it as tight as I can. You need to remember how you tied it and what order the loops go in so that you can slowly work the excess rope out of the knot tho. The tighter you can make it the better

thanks Geo! I'll keep that in mind while I work on them

I just rewicked a set of my own, I found that you want to go tight, but not so much where you distort the shape of the knot and overly compress the wick. Also little dabs of white school glue on the edges help to hold things together.

ha sanybody got any experience with monkeyfists, inside other monkey fists? i've had an idea for firesnakes, which means tying a small monkeyfist, then out of the same piece of wick, tying another larger one over the top. i'm just wondering wether the inside monkeyfist would distort the shape of the outer one at all?

If you do it correctly then no,

mind you I only have experience with tying these with non-flammable ropes. But my main question would be... why. If you tie a monkeyist around a monkeyfist... It would only add weight and I don't think your flames would be any better. Especially since the internal monkeyfist probably wouldn't have enough oxygen to burn properly.

I imagine that while the flame would be the same, the burn time would be substatially longer so I could see some benefits. It would be difficult to tie the outer one but it's probably worth a go with some cheap rope first to see if you can make it work

its purely for ease...not for bigger flames or longer burn times, although i think the latter is a given. the idea i have is to tie a small monkey fist at one end of the rope, then loop the rope through a heavy duty o ring, then tie anothe monkey fist around the existing one with the loose end of the rope.....its hard to describe, but in my mind it looks good! lol

Hmmmm.... Will have to see exactly what you mean.

I think a monkey fist in side another monkey fist would be redundant. There are better things to use for a core/resivoir/weight. Cotton has better absorbancy and wood or metal inside has better weight. It could turn out well but is it worth the effort?

Monkey fist sounds very martial arts, Is there any Ties?

they're martial arts in that a monkey fist in whatever context makes a legitimate weapon... Think they're used in the weapon meteors.

The title of this thread cracks me up!

Its martail arts in the sense that they use it as a practice weight as well. Real weapons have pointy things on the end i think. Meteors also sometimes have bowls of water ing them. There's some crazy videos on youtube.

I think I get what you mean but you may have a problem using the same diameter rope for 2 different sized monkey fists. if you tie the monkey fist in the usual way, your rope diameter should be roughly 1/4 of the core width. so if you're tying the knot and then using the same rope to tie another one around it, you'll need to experiment with the number of loops in each direction as the standard 4 loops won't look that good.



my mind mustn't be tuned in to the gutter this morning cause I don't get it