Good point Philp, you are correct. Each line in the block has the same force, and that force is equal to what you have at the cleat. So if you can pull the line coming out of the block that is about the same force every line in the block has on it. The connections from the block to the crossbar and the boom are totally different then the force on each line in the block.
I was just thinking an eye splice would make a really clean connection that wouldn't come loose over time, but I see your point about likely having to trim to length the line once I use it. Guess I just need to check the knot periodically.
milk back one end and inspect the core. If it has a good tight braid open it up and put a sample bury in it and see how it looks. Some cores are crap for burying that have a loose parallel braid. It's worth a look . . .
If you buy a new halyard you will only need about 55-60 feet. Endurabraid would work well and is reasonable $$.
its true you dont need to worry about the strenght of 4mm amsteel (around 1000lbs depending on which amsteel) but i still like an eyesplice at the end. it's only held to the blocks with a little becket and 1 pin.. not hard to remove if you want to wash your sheets.
and most important of all.. it looks cool!!!! (and no body will ever see it there if you dont point it out) but its cool!
i am seriously considering going with 4mm robline racing sheets for my halyard.. no taper needed (dynema blend) and i have a friend with a discount... :) but i will also look at Endurabraid
I had the same thought. As long as I was getting a custom tapered mainsheet I would be using for a long time, might as well spend the little extra for the cool factor. The fact it is technically a better connection is a bonus.
Holy moly that looks complicated! Do you guys really do a lot of this tapering/spicing? Still always though provoking! I'll never look at ropes again the same way.
Andrew, regarding the issue with burning holes in the spin:
This is caused by the hard round covers on today's quality sheets, especially the popular double braids. It is when you pull hard that the round firm surface of the halyard pinches the spin between and against the hoop. So, how do we illuminate this problem. Two ways, one is with the douse technique, the second is to change the douse part of the halyard. The idea is to get rid of this hard firm round surface that is doing all the damage to the spin, which can be accomplished in many ways. In your case, you can fix this problem without replacing your halyard, if it is a double braid. How? Remove the core about 25-30 feet (for your boat) on the dousing end. This allows the cover to lay flat against the spin and hoop when dousing, rendering your burn problems a thing of the past. The added advantage is that when the spin is set in very light air, the dousing end of the spin is much lighter and has less effect on the shape of the spin.
If you have a stripable double braid now, rather than remove the core, just milk the cover back 25-30, bury the cover, and walla!, you now have a tapered spin halyard. Core for the head (less windage), cover only for the douse (lighter weight, no burns). So easy a caveman can do it!
So, with all the money you will save on a new 90 foot halyard, you can get that new tapered mainsheet and buy me a rummy.
interesting.. i hadn't thought about stripping the core to get a flatter sheet... i thought it was the Dacron jacket that did the damage...i thought stripping the jacket was the answer. let me mull over this a bit..
At this time, i am trying to NOT spend money on my cat (isn't working) as i have just moved into a new house and its emptying my bank account... so the idea of NOT buying a new halyard is appealing (also not getting a tapered main at this time.. i will SUFFER with my racing sheets :)
Philip.. your rummy is waiting for you at my cooler...
Holy moly that looks complicated! Do you guys really do a lot of this tapering/spicing? Still always though provoking! I'll never look at ropes again the same way.
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Larry Smith
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Hahah.. if you are refering to the end to end splice link above,.. that is a bit complicated but a simple eyesplice is very easy to do (in 12 strand single braid like spectra/vectran etc)...
i saw a friend had a real soft line (amsteel) as his 4way adjuster (that goes accross the tramp) and i hated my steel cable (cheeze grader) so he showed me the basics of splicing and i got some fids.. i was all gung-ho on it for a month or so.. but in the end.,, i find HM line NOT all that useful on my cat... dynema creeps (stretch over time) so it needs to be somewhere creep doesnt matter (or re-adjusted) and vectran has no creep but is not soft. I have only found a couple of places where a HM line/splice have any actuall value (besides the cool factor)
I will make spectra trap lines when i need to replace my current ones.
Perhaps i will make a video showing how easy a simple eye splice is to make
I was looking at the APSltd site. Looks like I could taper to an amsteel line and then put an eye splice in the end of the amsteel to connect to the block without a knot.
This is what I'd planned to do, but when it came time, the HM lines required so much of the tail to run back up inside itself that it actually doubled the thickness of the sheet over halfway back to the end to end splice....so it was stiff and worthless.
I ended up putting a whiplock on the end, tying a bowline, and burying the bitter end back into the loop of the bowline just to clean it up.
The loads on the sheet don't matter to the 1/4" HM line at all.
The 12 strand single braids seem so easy to splice end to end, that my guess is that you can have a fairly large difference in diameters. They are kind of like chinese finger traps - if you just keep working two points towards each other the diameter grows and grows. If I had to do it over I'd try 3/16 or even 1/8 on the smaller one instead. It would make for a very ugly splice but I don't think it would be functionally affected at all.
Don't forget I've done the end to end all of 1 time in production, so take it FWIW.
a good splice will have a nice long tail/tuck that has been correctly tapered and the transition is extremely smooth.
Mine is fugly but works perfectly. Its very malleable. I was concerned that I'd have a stiff spot in it that wouldn't run well but its not an issue at all.
the HM lines required so much of the tail to run back up inside itself that it actually doubled the thickness of the sheet over halfway back to the end to end splice....so it was stiff and worthless.
You're doing it all wrong. Use a brummel splice and bury a few inches after tapering it. You only need to taper a few inches.
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. . . for Pete's sake, how in the hell do you add a picture without hosting it to a website??
You're doing it all wrong. Use a brummel splice and bury a few inches after tapering it. You only need to taper a few inches.
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. . . for Pete's sake, how in the hell do you add a picture without hosting it to a website??edited by: mummp, Dec 05, 2009 - 07:56 AM
Oh, I used Yale's class 2 eye splice, which has about 6 fids of line in the tail after the eye. I'll have to look for a brummel splice.
I don't know that you can upload a pic. I let picasa host most of mine....free and easy to use and easy to link to.
I made one of these in my first and only attempt at a soft shackle. I didn't have instructions, though, so I pulled the entire length of line through the knot to make it work. This looks much more practical.