As a skilled procrastinator, it has taken me years to finally get around to visiting my main rope supplier. A couple of weeks ago, Nina and I made the trip to meet the faces behind the emails and see how it is made.They have a very spacious factory kitted out with a range of machines for making every type of rope, twin and cord, from the thinnest right up to massive hawsers. Some of their ropes are highly specialised. For example, while we were there, we saw a lead-cored rope for the trawling industry being made. The big surprise, however, was to see rope being made with a central yarn in each ply, something I had been lead to believe was unique to Japanese rope, i.e. 3 plies, each with a central yarn surrounded by about 8 more is typical for a 5-6mm rope. When I enquired further, I was told this was pretty standard for machine-made rope and all the rope they make for me is made this way. It seems this wasn’t evident from previous correspondence due to translation issues. It was only with Nina’s translation help, several diagrams and sight of the machines that the reasons became apparent. The central strand in each ply provides a structure around which to twist the surrounding yarns, this keeping the finished ply more regular and circular. You can see this in the picture below, the central yarn runs through the middle of the guide.
Here’s the same machine showing the next part of the process in forming one of the three plies. You can see this component at the back of the photo above.
After the plies are formed, they go on to be twisted together to make the final rope. As you can see from both the ply-making guide and the one for forming the rope, they allow number of different configurations. The massive lead-cored hawser had dozens of spools of yarns feeding into it and, on the other side of the factory, there were machines making rope with mixed yarn colours.
They went on to say that only handmade rope commonly omits the central core. Thus, if you buy machine made rope, it is likely to have the ‘mysterious Japanese construction’. I’m surprised that so few of us have noticed. It just goes to show how much we see what we expect to see.
So, in spite of all the discussion, it seems that’s another myth busted and it seems that I have unknowingly been supplying rope of this construction all along. I really would have expected to have noticed it before. As you can see, even the supposed experts can woefully wrong. Never be afraid to question the ‘facts’ you are told, I don’t care how wise you, or they, think they are.