CRAFTSMANSHIP
Traditional Tool Rope gauge: made to measure This rope gauge from the early 1900s recalls a time when the shed of a tar-soaked ropery was a feature of every significant seaport. The amount of hemp and wire rope consumed by Britain’s merchant, fishing and fighting fleets was prodigious, while the increasingly popular pastime of yachting created an expanding market for lighter cordage. A contemporary reference work for the rigging of cruising and racing yachts was Dixon Kemp’s A Manual of Yacht and Boat Sailing, which listed the materials and sizes for every part of a cutter, yawl and schooner from a bobstay tackle to a topsail sheet. The gauge was made by John Rabone & Sons at the Hockley Abbey Works, Birmingham, and the firm described it as being “of well seasoned boxwood of good quality”, with its end grain neatly protected by brass chanelling fastened by tiny rivets, which are barely visible. Even now the calliper’s solid-brass slide works beautifully, being dovetailed into the
fine-grained boxwood stock to offer just the right amount of grip to hold the moving jaw as it clamps lightly across a rope’s diameter. In the ropeworks, this slim and tactile gauge would have been in and out of the foreman’s pocket constantly, checking and rechecking the ropes on which people’s hopes and livelihoods would hang. For general measurements there is a 4in (10cm) scale on the edge of the stock, but the scales used in calculating breaking loads are engraved on the calliper’s slide. On one side the rope’s diameter is shown
Clockwise from above: boxwood and brass rope gauge; the calliper converts diameter to circumference; dovetail fitting for the slide
while, reading across, its companion scale shows the rope’s circumference, which is the diameter multiplied by pi (3.1416). Knowing the rope’s circumference and construction (galvanised steel, manilla, tarred hemp), the ropemaker could then read its breaking load from the relevant table printed on the stock. With constant use these tables have become so worn as to be almost illegible, but it can be imagined that, having started in the ropeworks as an apprentice aged 14, the ropemaker would have become so familiar with the figures as to have committed them to memory.
RoBIn gatEs
stoRy and photogRaphs ROBIN GATES
RoBIn gatEs
CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2014
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