What Kestrel Does – Supersized


There are a bunch of videos of this on youtube; they started showing up in my feed around the time when I was hunting for wire rope for damascus-making.

This looks like a really good workout!

i wonder what a monkey’s fist knot would weigh in 3″ steel wire rope? If you attached your car keys you’d never lose them.

Comments

  1. kestrel says

    Wow that is pretty cool. Think I’ll stick with cotton rope and leather/rawhide etc. though.

    Tying a knot is steel wire rope would be difficult, and not just because you’d have to be super-strong to do it; the material would probably start to get weak at the places where it has to bend and flex over and over. It would make quite the key fob, though.

  2. lorn says

    A swaged eye is pretty much the industry standard as it it quick, reliable, and more practical in larger diameter wire rope but, still, I’m a little disappointed that they didn’t go for a traditional tucked eye. Tucked eyes and splices are less industrially practical. It takes time and a lot of manual skill that can only be gained by hands-on practice, but the end result is a work of practical industrial art.

    I’ve only worked with smaller wire ropes (1/2″and 3/4″ ), and only a dozen eyes total, but after I went back and redid the first well intentioned but half-assed attempts to get them right I felt quite proud of the results and new skills. Even if I never quite had time to master them.

    Except for my using a homemade splicing vice made out of wood, much less capable spikes, a far less organized and smooth process, and a lot more ass scratching, and blood … It looked something like this:

  3. johnson catman says

    lorn @2: I was fascinated watching the craftsman weave that, but I was totally disappointed when the video ended before he finished it off, especially after watching the one Marcus posted above (capacity 77 tons!!!).

  4. komarov says

    With the obvious effort needed bending even single strands it’s easy to imagine we’re watching a group of dwarves working over a giant’s bootlaces. There’s no way to tell if they’re the friendly or mischievous sort of dwarves, though.

Leave a Reply