Elspeth, a featured customer in the stories, has asked me about whipping so I thought it may be something other people may be interested in. Whipping has a few contexts but in relation to rope whipping we can use this technique for a few reasons. This includes:
Whipping the end of ropes to prevent them from fraying and unravelling.
Whipping a rope as a knot stopper.
Whipping around an object to protect that object or to take up slack around an object.
In relation to Elspeth question I’m going to take a quick look at whipping collars around spars that rest onto mats steps. It’s the same whipping that I use to create a protective collar around both mast and mizen mast where they rest on their respective thwarts.
To do a mast whipping collar you would use 4mm braid x 7 meters. The whipping twine you need is 1.5mm waxed. Here we can see the whipping has made a collar that protects the mizen mast and also helps to prevent movement and wear.
Looking at the diagram we can see the steps.
We would first loop the rope as step 1 and then begin to wrap the line around the mast leaving no slack. We need to leave the end of the rope sticking out the bottom of the wrap we are making in order to secure the other end in the last step.
We continue to wrap the rope around the mast until we reach the top of the loop, get close to the end of the rope or reach the desired height.
Then pass the last end of the rope through the loop and pull the first end of the rope. This closes the loop and secures the end of the rope and the whipping in place.
This has certainly helped Elspeth from her reply,
“Super advice thank you, it is such a great help to get these photos too.
Elspeth x”
Hopefully this will help other people too.