When I was a kid, I found a book in the school library called 'Boy's Own Paper'.
It was a compendium of a very old magazine for boys, and had some 'Popular Mechanics' style articles.
I read an article about making a simple machine to make high quality bowstrings, and I built one.
It worked pretty good, and I remembered it when I was thinking about small ropes for cannon.
A quick Google search showed me that there is a demand for such a device because people need scale ropes for model ships, and presumably, cannon.
People call these things 'ropewalks', although I understand that this more properly refers to the long narrow buildings in which full scale versions of this machine were used to make ropes in the old days.
You can buy or build a ropewalk, either from scratch or from a kit.
These things seem to be well made, and it would be nice to own one if you made a lot of rigging for model ships etc, but what about if you just want to make the occasional few feet of rope here and there for your model cannon?
Well, the plans in the Boy's Own Paper were for a version of this machine that's so simple, it's beautiful.
You don't need to bother with gears, drive belts, complex mechanisms, or even accurate measurements, and you almost certainly have everything you need to make one lying around at home, so it costs practically nothing to build one
I made the ropewalk I'm about to describe in less than ten minutes, using only a drill, a saw, a piece of wood, and some wire.
It will make rope every bit as good as a commercial model will.
With that lengthy and rather unnecessary preamble out of the way, let's get on with making our ropewalk:
Let me start by saying that I'm not going to give specific dimensions and measurements for this project, because that would be too constraining.
I'm sure most people will have suitable materials lying around at home, so I'll just show the principles.
Once you've read through the article and understand how it works, you can make your own mind up about what materials to use.
I'll mention what I used for mine, but only take it as a rough guide.
You need three relatively thin pieces of wood. I used an offcut of 1/2" x 3" board, which I cut up into three pieces.
I made one piece smaller than the other two.
I left the other pieces a bit longer so I have something to hold onto while using the ropewalk, but this isn't really necessary.
You also need some stiff wire. I happened to have some stainless steel stuff, but a wire coathanger or some brazing rod or similar would be perfectly suitable.
Clamp two pieces of wood together and draw three dots in a roughly equilateral triangle arrangement on the top. I spaced the dots about 1.5" apart.
Choose a drill bit a little wider than your wire, and drill where you marked the dots, drilling through both boards.
Unclamp the boards.
You should have two boards looking something like this:
Cut three lengths of wire about 3-4" long, and use pliers to bend a hook shape at one end of each.
I cheated here because my pieces of wire already had loops at the ends, so I just opened the loops slightly to make hooks.
Push the wire pieces through the holes in one piece of wood.
Leave about 1/2" of wire, and then make a 90 degree bend in each.
Measure (or just eyeball) the distance between the holes in the wood, and make another 90 degree bend in each piece of wire slightly smaller than this measurement.
The idea is that the wires can rotate freely without fouling on each other.
Pass the free ends of the three wires through the holes in the second piece of wood.
Trim and bend the remaining wire to keep everything together.
Now take your third piece of wood, and drill three larger holes in it:
That's it!
Grasp the larger piece of wood, and move the smaller one in a circular motion, and you'll see that this individually rotates each of the three hooks.
To make a rope, you'll need your new ropewalk, some thread or string, and a weight.
For the weight, just use anything that's heavy enough to keep the strings taut, and that can be tied onto the strings. I used an adjustable wrench.
To make rope:
Decide what you want to make the rope out of.
To get the hang of things, try ordinary white string.
For these photos, I used double strands of string on each hook. You can use as many or as few as you like within reason. It's probably easiest to start with one strand per hook for your first attempt.
Cut three lengths of string. About 5' long would be good for a practice piece.
Tie one string to each of the three hooks.
(in the photo, the strings are just looped over the hooks because I used double strands. If you use a single strand, you will need to knot them to the hooks)
Pass the other ends of the strings through the holes in the board, making sure that they are not twisted together at any point and tie the ends together and secure them to the weight.
Each string should pass straight from it's hook and through the hole in the board without touching or crossing the other strings, like the strings on a puppet.
In a standing position, stand on the board with one foot to prevent it turning.
Raise the ropewalk until the strings are taut.
Look at the strings, and note the direction in which the fibers are twisted.
Maintaining slight upward pressure to keep the strings taut, start turning the top plate of the ropewalk in the same direction as the twist of the individual strings.
You'll notice that the strings start getting a little shorter as they twist tighter.
Keep turning the top plate until the strings are so twisted that they almost begin to kink into little 'knots'.
If any knots form, unwind the strings a few turns and massage the knots out with your fingers.
With practice, you will learn to judge when to stop twisting.
Now for the moment of truth!
Gently take your foot off the bottom board. The board and weight will start spinning, and the strings will magically twist themselves together into a rope.
When the board/weight stops spinning, and just before it tries to start spinning in the opposite direction, grab hold of it to stop it moving.
you should end up with something like this:
All that remains is to cut the rope free and tie the ends to prevent them fraying.
If the rope is 'hairy', ie has a lot of small fibers sticking out, pass it through a flame a couple of times and they will burn away.
a yellow flame (candle, lighter etc) will leave soot on the rope. This can look quite good, but if you want to avoid it, use a blue gas or alcohol flame instead.
Rubbing the rope with beeswax will give a nice final finish.
Now that you've tried it with a single string per hook, you can start experimenting!
Try two or three strands per hook for a thicker rope, or three strands of cotton thread per hook for a thin but detailed rope.
Try using only two of the three hooks to make a twisted pair, then use three of these together to make a thicker rope.
Make three thin ropes from thread, then use those together to make a rope.
For longer ropes, get someone to act as an assistant, and go to the top of the stairs and dangle the threads down.
As I said above, the beauty of this design is it's simplicity, in particular the simplicity of the crank mechanism, which dispenses with the gears used in other designs.
This ropewalk could be easily redesigned with more than three hooks for making different rope designs.
I haven't tried, but I see no reason why you couldn't make a larger version for twisting ropes for a full size cannon, using period correct materials and thread counts.
If you look on youtube, you'll see several examples of a more sophisticated version of this machine that is turned on its side so it works horizontally.
Instead of a weight, these machines use a crank assembly and a sliding bobbin type thing.
Unless you want to go into full scale rope production, most of these improvements are window dressing, as they only improve ease of use rather than quality of the finished product.
I hope this helps a couple of people make their cannon look 'just right'.
If you try this yourself, please share your results, ideas, and any improvements you come up with
