Despite growing up on the water, sailing, fishing and doing everything rope-related, I always had a dirty secret to hide from those who thought I "knew the ropes" - I never learned how to splice. Everything was tied with bowlines, figure 8s, purchased ropes with eyes on the ends...

So today I remedied that! I picked up some Amsteel at a boat shop (which is just hollow-core braided Spectra, after all) and made these 1m extensions for handle flying.

The splice is the "Locked Brummel" and the first one took me 30 minutes and was a bit crappy, but each successive one got faster and I think the last was under 5 minutes. I didn't even have a proper fid, I just used a piece of bent wire.

The nice thing about splicing (other than that it preserves 100% of rope strength and won't slip) is that unlike knots it is completely deterministic - these 4 extensions were easy to make exactly the same length. Now I can go ahead and order that 500# spectra and make a bunch of linesets!



Wow, I need to vacuum! Lots of dog hair down there when you look close up.

Been splicing lines for quite a few years now. We also have fids for lines under 300 lb. I have some mega fids for larger lines for my personal use. We call them knotless loops here. Quite awesome but can be very time consuming to do.

For anyone wanting to know how to do a splice, here is a link: http://www.awindofchange.com/splice.html

That splice is neat, I think for that style you need one of the latch-hook fids? I rather like the Brummel http://www.animatedknots.com/brummeldemo/index.php due to its locking nature, so the line can be marked and the splice placed in that precise position.

So, from what I have read, I am assuming lines with spliced eyes need no sleeving, is that correct?

very nice, man i love it taught myself as well...right down to to the guitar string fid! i feel like its right of passage after being on Flysurfers!

gotta know your knots, GROG's web site is perfect for helping.

http://www.animatedknots.com/

dah! rectifier had it in his post! anyway damn nice man

I am going to need to do that myself, I ran over my line with my ski

Chrisz, you are going to want this splice: http://www.bhptackle.com/pages.php?pageid=15

Note that it consumes a fair amount of line, so you will have to mark all your lines and splice them the same way to maintain equal lengths. This splice looks nice and simple though!

This stuff does look cool and I've always been interested in knots and such... Loved the link above for the Brummel splice.

Cool stuff indeed!