I haven’t spliced ropes, but I have sailed. I even replaced, but didn’t splice, a brace; think it was the fore lower-topsail rather than main.
I notice the instructions for splicing tend to show modern nylon ropes where you can prevent the ends from fraying by melting them a bit. A more traditional way is by whipping.
You mean “boaty-talk”?
O’Brianese.
I still don’t really understand, but this guy seems to know what he’s talking about.
Weirdly, I ran into him this morning when I was looking for an example of a New Hampshire accent.
You know the weird conclusion I came to just now, studying the assorted on-line material about sails and rigging?
The command isn’t specific enough! There are two main braces, one to portside and one to starboard.
I thought there were two main braces for each yard.
I think the main stays ares large ropes that holds the main mast up.
Aren’t there two braces for each yard of each mast?
The reason it still exists as a signal is that in Commonwealth navies it can still be ordered as a spirit issue to celebrate special occasions. In the RCN, a member of the Royal Family, the Governor General or the Chief of Defence Staff can order this.
There are two braces for each yard, but there’s only one yard, the lowest one on the main mast, that would be called the main. Depending on how many sails you have on each mast, the ones above the main would be (for example) the lower topsail, upper topsail, t’gallant, and royal; each of those is attached to its corresponding yard, the lower topsail yard, etc. On the foremast, you have the same sails and yards all prefaced by ‘fore’, fore lower topsail yard, etc. And the main (lowest) sail on each mast is sometimes referred to as the course.
I think one issue is that as Colibri notes, that actual rope may be up to 5 inches in diameter. This isn’t a just job for nimble fingers. In order to get a splice that will run though the blocks the entire length of the splice will need to be tapered, and the length of the splice will be quite long. But the grunt work will be maintaining and generating the tension in the rope components. Probably the splice will require setting up in windlass and very carefully brought up to tension and settled down. Rope making with natural fibres was something of an art, and spicing near black art.
Under sail one would assume that the brace itself would be augmented by a jury rigged brace, the tension removed and the rope removed from the system. On deck the brace would be spliced, and the rethreaded and the jury rigged brace removed.
I can see it as a difficult and critical problem to get right. Not so much pure grunt work, but one fraught with a lot of steps that could go wrong. And if the splice fails, these ships were not forgiving. A yard brace letting go could result in a remarkable amount of damage and injury. The entire job was not done until the brace was back in service and fully loaded up.
So I assume a 5in rope is made of twist of smaller strands which are in turn made twists of even smaller strands and so forth and so on down to tiny threads, right? If so, how many levels down do you unravel to the splice together? Just the first main twists/all the way down to the tiniest thread/other inbetween?
Well, a cable is made from three ropes, each of which has three strands. I still have not found a description of a main-brace splice, but in Ashley’s description of a mariner’s splice he put in a nine-inch cable you can read one has to open each rope and manipulate individual strands. Splicing heavy tightly-laid cables is described as a mechanically difficult job, and he also describes special jigs to hold things in place while splicing, tools needed, etc.
ETA he also says most important is “careful workmanship”…
Now that I think about it, would a main brace (or any other line) have enough excess rope that they could afford to lose several feet when splicing it together after a break? My ship had coils of Manila rope on board. Whatever line they needed, they’d get the right size coil, figure out where they needed to cut it, wrap whipping around it (like the picture I posted earlier), and cut it. Every line was as long as it needed to be, with enough left over to handle it safely and secure it, but not a whole lot more. If a brace broke and they needed to unravel 6 or 8 feet in order to make a strong enough splice, I’m not sure if the remaining rope would be long enough to do its job.
Maybe they were on a tighter budget back then, and cut their ropes a bit longer because they knew they’d be splicing them later.
And five inch diameter seems huge for a brace to me. I think we used inch-and-a-half for our strongest braces. Maybe ropes were weaker back then, too.
Modern ropes are insanely stronger. Materials plus construction both help greatly. I imagine the big problem with most of these lines is that they wear at specific points - for a brace probably where they pass through a flying block - so under load but also moving about. So you get a break at one specific spot part way down the line. If the line is initially spec’ed out with enough additional length you might have enough to allow for enough repairs before the entire line dies. No doubt however, loose ends of lines on boats are a serious accident waiting to happen. Even on modern boats, and even to the best. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIjKjNwUbfc
I have a book by one Verrill, of American Boy Magazine, in which he states that the strength of a Manila rope, in tons, is roughly a fifth of the square of its circumference in inches.
So, a five inch diameter manilla rope would be 50 tons. Which is a lot. One assumes that is breaking strength. The shock loads on a sailing craft can be quite high. The safe load margin for Manila seems to be 12. So the working load for a 5 inch rope would be 8 tons. Still pretty high for a brace. Unless that 5 inch is circumference - which is a common trap when specifying rope. That would be 5 tons. which is now rather low. A modern 5" circumference (39mm dia) exotic (ie Dynex Dux 75) has a breaking strain of 157 tons. Hard to imagine it - a 30:1 difference. (Even a modern construction manila rope of 40mm comes in at only 9 tons.)
Most people will not be rigging with these exotics, but even run of the mill marine rope is double to triple modern ropes of sisal or Manila. Nobody on a racing boat won’t be using Spectra or Dynema where they can. In general these materials exceed steel lines of the same diameter and yet are light enough to float.
And none of this touches on the use of carbon or aramid (PBO) standing rigging, which is so strong it has enabled an entire new generation of rig designs.
A bit more information -
Circumference? That is a 6" diameter.
That’s probably a good thing. If there was only one, and it NEEDED splicing, giving the order to splice it might result in something other than what the skipper intended.
