Looks Easy

This shit is hard. Making hemp rope.
I get all sweaty and OCD driven and when I am out there past the very edge of what I know how to do out in the shit I have thought about and think I have the idea but have never actually done. It is a terrifying and lonely place. And then somehow it starts to resemble something I recognize and I start to have hope once again. Which alternates with despair until the thing is over and done with.
I used to think it was the crank that made me like that but I am just the same at 12 years clean. Utterly absorbed, concentrating to the point where I actually start to drool and I have to remember to close my mouth and swallow.

Bob came up last week and we made some railroad sinnet, a simple two-strand affair made out of spun yarn, hemp in this case. It was not as easy as it looked in the diagram, and I had to make some adjustments and tighten shit up quite a bit but we got a 40 foot chunk of usable material.

They call it railroad sinnett because it is two yarns paralell but twisted. That's the scrap of it with green tape on the end. You make baggywrinkle out of it by tucking bits of chopped off rope yarn scrap between the strands.

Thursday I made another one by myself, which is harder in a way, but also easier because I didn't have to explain anything or verbalize anything I could just work with my hands hardwired to my imagination. Nice. Later on Friday I got some cedar scraps out of the junkbin at Parr Lumber and I made a new jig with some improvements, which was actually slightly easier to use. I have to be careful, a lot of times it's not the machine, it's the operator.

This jig is bigger than  the first one, separating the hooks and thus the strands a bit more so they dont get all up in each others shizzness. You can see the elements still hooked over the spinner hooks.

So today I finally got my nuts up and I went downstairs to the yard behind our building where there is sufficient room to spread this shit out and I hooked it all up and started to try and actually make some rope, and once again Iwas out there past all familiar landscape and into the agony of facing whether or not I am full of delusional bullshit, a not unknown outcome, and it is only the fact that it was really threatening to rain that I had to break off and come inside, project begun. Project far from completion, though.

At first the yarns want to be like they always do, it's a habit of shape, and it takes a minute for the fibers to wake up and realize things have changed and then to relax into the new shape.I know how they feel. This is the glob of interrupted project I am left to try and not fuck with until I get a chance to spread it out again outside.

 The spun yarn is left-hand laid, the twist is anti-clockwise. So when you twist it into sinnet it comes out right-laid. Fine. Then when you twist the 3 elements of sinnet together it come out in what they call left-laid cable, which is rope made out of twisted elements of more than one strand. So I have a bit of left-laid 3-strand Hungarian hemp cable-laid rope for the edges of my spritsail.

This here is what it is supposed to look like and I for one think it looks the real old-time article and will be a fine thing to have on the boat. I will get more mileage bragging about how I did it than I will out of the sail itself.

I think it will work OK in the end, its big enough around and feels quite strong but I will tell you this one thing, it is a lot harder than I thought it would be and it does not come together by itself. At first it was like "Oh fuck me this ain't working"and it just kind of lays there in a kind of unhealthy-looking gob  but when I started to fuck with it in that particular desperate kind of "don't do this to me" way lo and behold, it actually began to look like rope, and then, miracle, to actually BE actual rope.
We were very happy.