SpoolMasterTM

Years ago I was working for Kalmar Nyckel during a winter maintenance period where we were scheduled to make a pile of new stays and shrouds.  We had a few huge spools of white polyester cable and hawsers that eventually needed to be turned black for good looks and extra ultra violet light protection.  "We could paint them by hand." was one suggestion.

Eventually we decided on running the cables through a half latex paint, half water solution, which works very well absorbing into the cable giving a nice coating.  There was one problem.  How do we effectively dry such an amount of cable without taking up too much space, getting paint everywhere, or dirt on the new cable?

And thus the SpoolMaster5000TM was born.

*images, drwing, of the painting process coming soon

Today I work with the Swedish East India Trading Company ship replica Götheborg.  Here we also have our own unique problems.  We make all of our own rope for rigging the ship.  The material we use to make the rope is hemp, and the material we use to preserve it is pine tar.  One thing is the same, the rope must be coiled.

Please welcome SpoolMaster5000TM-OldschoolEdition to the club.

No glue was harmed during the creation of this SpoolMasterTM.

I promise you, all of the joints didn't fit this neatly.

Fid

n. a tapered implement, made of wood, iron, bone, or other dense workable material, used to aid in splicing by separating strands of a rope.

In February of this year I had the pleasure of visiting Her Majesty's Historic Shipyard in Portsmouth, United Kingdom. With two historic ships amazingly intact, and half of a preserved hull from a sixteenth century warship, the Mary Rose, this piece of history is one of a kind, and definitely well worth the visit for me. I only wish I could have spent weeks there researching those vessels.

After inspection of the HMS Victory via a guided tour, I got to talking to Ben, the officer on duty for the day. He was very enthusiastic about the ship and eager to chat with me about her, two traits I really appreciated. I can not recall how long we were engaged in conversation. As we discussed rigging and the hull, our chats led us into a rigging workshop that is due to be demolished to make way for the new Mary Rose museum. Ben handed me a piece of copper sheeting removed from the hull as he told me about some of the various methods of preservation and maintenance, like the removal of most of the copper sheeting since the ship will most likely never touch water again, and told me to keep it. I was also graciously gifted a trunnel from the upper deck replacement and quite a large shiver of a deck beam. The people at the airport didn't seem to like my gifts as much as I did. Even though "Piece of oak" is not listed in the dangerous, do not carry on and airplane list.

Upon returning to Sweden, and after proudly showing off my cool new souvenirs, I had decided to turn the unusable hunk of history into a nice, salty, usable tool; a fid. I knew immediately that I did not want any sort of modern implement to come anywhere near my 250 year old relic, so I climbed aboard the East Indiaman and went straight for the carpenter. One of the coolest tools on board was the smithed draw knife, which was just about perfect for the job I was about to accomplish. I worked the oak into a nice shape relrelatively quickly. After completely to my liking I massaged in a couple coats of linseed oil to give it some traditional protection, not to mention a beautiful almond color.

The piece of oak was large enough to wield a nice wide 14" fid, a perfect complement to my ditty bag. I can not wait to put it to use! There is definitely some hardcore tallship street-cred to have not only a hand carved oak fid, but a relic in the ditty bag. The spirit of Nelson himself is in that fid!

Yarn

Definition: One of the threads of which a rope is composed.

Not too much has happened with me this weekend by way of ships. Malin and I took a bone-chilling bike ride into Stenungsund for some relaxing reading in the semi-comfortable couches of Espresso House, which look out over the empty marina and a nice Swedish archipelago background. But mostly I have simply been relaxing with Malin and her family at home, having fika, watching Let's Dance and the Melodifestivalen. The latter two I am not so entirely proud of so let's move on shall we?

As far as my hobby and passion, I spliced and served up some cringles on my rig bag. The only difficulty in this was that I didn't necessarily have what one would call rope. What I did have were various lengths of short hemp yarns and fibers that have been salvaged from their unfortunate fate of the trash cans at the shipyard. I first spun up some three strands with two yarns in each, then for the fun of it I laid them into a short rope. That was my actual first experience with laying up a rope completely by hand. I have made rope before with various rope making tools. I look forward to, hopefully very soon, when we will lay up the new rigging for the East Indiaman. As for the bag cringles, I had split the short rope back into three strands and laid them up through the stitched eyes and into cringles, and served them with some leftover yarns. The bag is coming along nicely. Since my tool collection is now acceptable for the moment, I will stitch in some pockets along the inside to fit them. I plan on splicing up a nice lanyard and a cringle to receive it on the bottom bolt rope for throwing it over my shoulder when it isn't to be hoisted up to me.

Is this an acceptable amount of description? Should I go into further detail on the how it's done side of things? Is it too much?