This is the Essential Knots Kit, it contains 48 knot-tying flash cards and two practice ropes, allowing you to learn many of the most useful knots in the comfort of your own home.
Knowing your knots used to be the mark of a man, knot tying is still taught extensively by the Boy Scouts, and it’s an absolutely critical skill for sailors, overlanders, medics, and campers. This kit will teach you dozens of them, and the flash cards will help keep them fresh in your mind.
Knowing your knots used to be the mark of a man, knot tying is still taught extensively by the Boy Scouts, and it’s an absolutely critical skill for sailors, overlanders, medics, and campers. This kit will teach you dozens of them, and the flash cards will help keep them fresh in your mind.
Silodrome Speedrun: The Essential Knots Kit
If you’ve ever watched someone tie up a boat or rig a tarp in seconds and wondered how they made it look so easy, the Essential Knots Kit might just be a good place to start. Many knots can look like magic until someone shows you the trick, and then they become one of the most satisfying skills whip out whenever required.
The kit was created by Andrew Adamides and came out in 2021 as part of Arcturus’s Sirius Leisure Kits series. Adamides calls himself a confirmed “knot-nut,” and he’s spent over a decade researching and writing nonfiction books and guides.
The kit arrives in a lidded box, it contains a 48 page full-color instruction book, a deck of flash cards, and two practice ropes. Each knot has straightforward step-by-step instructions, but it doesn’t stop at just how to tie it. Adamides also covers each knot’s history, how difficult it is, and what you’d actually use it for.
The kit covers both practical and decorative knots, so it suits someone who wants useful knots for the campsite or the dock as well as someone who simply enjoys rope work. The knots listed include the fisherman’s knot, the camel hitch, the reef knot (better known in the US as the square knot), the prusik knot, the clove hitch, the slip knot, and the figure-of-eight. Those five cover a lot of everyday tasks, from joining two lines to tying off to a post.
Of all the knots in the book, the reef knot may very well be the oldest. It’s believed to be at least 4,000 years old, with some claiming it’s up to 9,000 years old. It’s believed that it was created by sailors for reefing sails, hence its name, but countless other uses have been discovered over the millennia from macrame textiles and tying bandages to tieing belts and sashes.
Many knots can look like magic until someone shows you the trick, and then they become one of the most satisfying skills whip out whenever required.
Once you’ve worked through the book, the flash cards turn practice into something more akin to a game than a test, and allow you to see whether the knots have actually stuck. This is right where most people come unstuck with knots – they learn one, don’t use it for a month, and they’ve forgotten it. A quick run through the flash card deck keeps them fresh in your mind.
The Essential Knots Kit is available to buy here on Amazon, it retails for around $20 USD though your exact pricing may vary slightly depending on your region or local Amazon store.
Images courtesy of Andrew Adamides
Articles that Ben Branch has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
