I didn’t and now need to go back and re-secure one end at the V. One thing to watch out for is that you need to leave slack in the chafe guard to allow the nylon rope to stretch under load. I secured all of the chafe guard using whipping thread. I threaded the chafe guard on for the eyes at the ends of the arms before splicing those eyes. I bunched it up at the thimble end so that I could make the V splice and then pulled it up over the V splice. I made sure it was long enough to cover both the thimble splice and the V splice.
I threaded the chafe guard for the thimble after making that first splice. The other trick was getting the chafe guard in place. Those two arms then got eye splices at the end of each for looping onto the bow cleats. I then pulled the huge eye tight and cut it at the end away from the splice, giving me two equal length arms. In essence, I ended up with a small eye splice at one end wrapped around a thimble and a huge eye splice of the rest of the rope at the other end such that the two splices ended very near each other. The approach I took was to use a single length of rope and not cut it until after the thimble and the V had been spliced. When constructing the bridle, I wanted to make sure I got the lengths of the two arms of the V as close to the same as possible with minimal cutting and waste. I really wish they had been around when I learned to splice, trying to figure it out from Chapman’s was a challenge.
#Rope eye splice kit how to#
If you don’t know how to splice three-strand rope, I suggest having a look at the many tutorials on YouTube. I also whipped right at the thimble to keep it nice and tight. All of these are standard three-strand splices that have been whipped at the end to keep them tidy.
The chafe guard material is bunched up so you can see the splice, but it does extend to the end of the splice once extended as shown in the third picture.Īt the end of the two arms of the bridle, I added chafe guard and eye splices to allow for easy attachment to the bow cleats. Below is a picture of the splice of the V and another showing the thimble spliced in. The bridle consists of two lengths of 3/4” nylon three-strand rope, spliced together in a V with a stainless steel thimble spliced to the bottom of the V. If you want a fun project to do at home, read on. If you don’t have an affinity for rope work or don’t have time to put into sourcing all the parts and building one, I recommend buying theirs. That’s when the whole price thing became a factor and I decided to build my own.įull disclosure here, the bridle I built borrows heavily from the Mantus bridle design. The bridle system they had on the site seemed to be exactly what I wanted. I thought I had it figured out half a dozen times before I found a reference to the Mantus website. There are chain hook rigs that can be used and various knots that can be tied to both chain and rope to attach the bridle. I was in a quandary though because I needed it to attach to both the rope and chain parts of the rode. My good friend Google showed me lots of different bridles and rode attachments, and I read through many board postings from sailors offering up their solutions. That said, I really did enjoy the process of building it and am happy with the product. It did take me longer than I expected, but pretty much everything I do takes longer than I expect.
However, I was just going to be doing nothing useful so my time isn’t really a factor. Between the cost of the parts and the time I spent building the bridle, I’m sure it would have been cheaper to just buy one. I like working with rope and this seemed like it would be a fun project. Being winter when my mind was thinking about this, I decided to make one myself. I thought to buy an out-of-the-box bridle, but bridled at the cost. The obvious solution is to use an anchor bridle, a device that connects to the rode and is tied to both bow cleats, taking the load off of the anchor roller and the windlass. Also, there is considerable pressure on the anchor roller and a tendency for the rode to chafe on the roller as the bow is blown back and forth. That means there is no good way to get the load off of the windlass unless all the chain had been deployed. There is an opening on the port side of the anchor locker hatch cover leading to the bow cleat, but it is awkward to use and works only for the rope part of the rode. Kestrel has an anchor windlass, but no central cleat or post on which to lock the anchor rode down. Last summer, we spent some time at anchor.
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