Testing · Posted by the MoorSafe team · · 4 min read
What 40,657 pounds looks like: inside the Yale Cordage tensile test
We put a 300 lb traditional mushroom and a 300 lb MoorSafe prototype on a 100-foot test bed and pulled until something broke. Here is what happened.
Yale Cordage in Saco runs a horizontal tensile bed rated to 1.3 million pounds. It is the kind of machine built for ship hawsers, not mooring anchors, which is exactly why we wanted it — no question about whether the rig was the limit.
Both anchors were rigged identically: shackle to the top eye, rope loop to the crosshead, load increased steadily. The traditional mushroom fractured at the stem at 38,560 lb. The MoorSafe prototype held to 40,657 lb before its three stem joints dislocated.
A 5% margin is not the headline. The headline is that adding the bars did not weaken the anchor — the most common question we get from harbormasters — and the failure mode moved away from the single stem, which is the part that fails in the field.
Full method and photos are in the info packet.
See the anchor and the full test results
Three bars turn the stem into a cone that significantly reduces the risk of chain wrap. Tested at Yale Cordage in Saco and for 28 days in Casco Bay. Made in Maine.