Need a stronger anchor? Try a basket hitch
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A basket hitch (and no, I don't know why it's called that) is pretty simple. It’s a loop of loop of webbing, cord, or rope, doubled into a “U” shape.
Takeaway: a basket hitch more or less doubles the breaking strength of whatever material you’re using, because the load is shared over four strands instead of two.
For most climbing situations, this doesn't really apply much, because the maximum possible forces in any recreational climbing situation are never going to be more than about 9 kN. If you're using a sewn sling that has a Minimum Breaking Strength (MBS) of 22 kN, no worries.
And, even clipped in the regular end to end method shown below, the 28 kN where it broke is probably stronger than your carabiner!
But in a few cases that I can think of, knowing a trick to increase the strength of your rigging might be helpful:
You need to use some skinny 5 mm cord for some kind of anchor building or application that it's not really designed for, and you want to squeeze some extra strength from your material.
If you want to do something involving possible LARGE forces, such as pulling your car out of the ditch, dropping a big tree limb, or detaching a wrapped whitewater raft off a rock.
My friend Ryan Jenks, the mad scientist gear-breaking genius behind the great YouTube channel HowNOT2, did some break testing on this.
Here are Youtube screenshots of the results of three different break tests. He’s using a standard sewn 8 mm Dyneema sling, rated with an MBS of 22 kN.
