Rope Fender

Hello there... I'm back. I took some time off to do a little "production" work (tie things already published here, but for family and friends), and also to pursue another hobby. As the temperature had dropped here in Maine I've been getting the urge to get back into new knotting projects. In this case, it's more like finish a knotting project as this has been sitting in my drawer since the summer.

This is a rope fender, or more aptly a waste rope fender that I made from some dog leash left overs.It was fairly common practice "back in the day" to utilize old rope to make boat fenders. In this case I am using 1/2" poly-prop lobster pot warp line. The fender is probably only big enough to be effective on a dinghy, but it is is certainly something that could scale up. I also think in this day and age I'd stay away from mooring a fancy expensive yacht with a rope fender as I would be concerned about scratching the paint. The fenders sure can look nice though.

The project was adapted from the book The Marlinspike Sailor by Hervey Garrett Smith. It has a rope core crown wrapped in the 6 strands that come from a looped piece of 3 strand rope. At the bottom the strands are walled back up into the fender. I also whipped the loop with a 4 lead by 3 bight turks head. Could probably be a little neater, but the poly pro is a bear to work with and keep tight. A simple and fun little project. Thanks. 

Hand Saw Clip Lanyard

This is a hand saw lanyard that I made for the hand saw I use to cut walking sticks and such.  The core of the lanyard is a piece of black paracord.  Over top of the paracord I tied a 4 strand continuous or spiral crown sinnet (click spiral version in this tutorial), keeping all of the hitches going in the same direction.  While I don't consider myself much of a "crown & wall-er", I will say a crown sinnet builds quickly and looks nice.  I did make a mistake and there is a mis-stitch in the sinnet which you can see in the foreground of the picture (boo).  However, by the time I figured it out I didn't feel like taking 3 inches of sinnet apart to fix it.

Then I used this tutorial from the Pineapple Knot Forum to tie Type 1, 2 pass pineapple knots from 7Lx6B turks heads to cover the sinnet ends.  The tapered end nature of the pineapple knot makes it useful for this purpose.