Setting Up a Home Rigging Workshop

Rope work needs less space than almost any other boat maintenance, and it pays for itself quickly. A spliced eye costs nothing to make and a rigger charges real money for it. What it does need is a bench you can pull against, decent light, and a small set of tools that are actually designed for the job.

Space and light

The critical dimension is not floor area, it is length. To splice you need to unlay a metre or two of rope and keep tension on the standing part while you tuck. A three-metre run with a solid anchor at one end — a bench leg, a vice, a deck fitting — is enough for most work. A garage wall, a shed, or the foredeck of the boat itself will do.

Light matters more than people expect, because most of the defects you are looking for are subtle. Chafe, glazing and a cover that has gone shiny are all easier to see in bright, directional light. A task lamp you can move, rather than a single overhead fitting, is the right answer.

The tools that are genuinely worth having

Setting up a tension point

Splicing is much easier when the rope is held taut. The simplest arrangement is a cleat or a hook bolted to a bench or a wall at comfortable working height, with the rope made fast and the standing part running away from you. You pull against it, and both hands stay free to work.

If you have no fixed point, a loop of line around a bench leg or a door handle will do for occasional work. What you want to avoid is trying to hold tension with one hand and tuck with the other — it is slow, it is uncomfortable, and the result is worse.

Storage, which is part of the system

• Coil and hang, do not pile. A line that is coiled and hung dries, and you can see its whole length when you inspect it. A line in a heap hides its damage.
• Keep lines out of sunlight. Ultraviolet light is the single largest cause of synthetic rope ageing in storage. A dark cupboard is better than a sunny shelf.
• Label everything. Size, length, fibre and purchase date. A bag of unlabelled line is a bag of unknown ratings.
• Store retired items separately. Better still, cut them into short lengths and use them for light duty, so they cannot quietly return to a load-bearing role.

A first project that teaches everything

Make yourself a set of mooring lines. Buy a length of three-strand nylon, cut it to length, fuse or whip the ends, splice an eye in one end of each line, and fit a thimble where it will bear on a piling. That single project covers measuring, cutting, finishing, splicing, thimble fitting and inspection — and at the end you have something you will actually use.

What to learn next

1. The eye splice in three-strand line, to the point where you can do it without instructions.
2. Whipping, in both the common and West Country patterns.
3. The eye splice in double braid, which is the technique most lines on a modern boat actually need.
4. The short splice, so you can repair a line rather than replace it.
5. Inspection and record-keeping, so you know when to retire what you have made.