sometimes people ask here about rope to start their splicing adventures for whoopie slings and such, without spoiling precious dyneema with the first attempts. i'm always on the lookout for cheap spliceable rope myself, as i like to mess with it, and it's useful to have around.
so, recently, i found a few handy sources:
- hornbach (sort of a home depot or such here in eu), they have some 2mm polypropylene line which seems good quality (feels nice, nice blue color too) and is very nice to splice. i don't have a rig to measure accurately, but i broke a few samples with my weight, and pulled a few to over 25kg or so without damage, i would estimate it breaks somewhere in the 30-40kg range, which makes it already useful for various things, like tarp guylines and other small load projects. (it is also surprisingly close to nylon lines in the same size, which is pretty impressive)
price is about 0.15euro /m, being PP it's lighter even than dyneema
- lidl (supermarket chain, that has their own brand of tools and such): they have spools of 2mm and 1.7mm PP, both spliceable, both perfectly capable of over 20kg when spliced, again i can only estimate for now, i'd guess the 2mm to break around 40kg, the 1.7 around 30kg. doesn't feel as nice as the hornbach one, but it's even easier to splice (very loose braid), and it's 2euro/50m spool (dirt cheap). the 2mm is some sort of orange-pink, the 1.7 is some radioactive light green, both look rather nice actually.
my "spliceability tests" were all done with a bent piece of wire, nothing fancy.
all these hold friction hitches very nicely (a blake hitch is my usual test, with all these lines it holds very nicely, and when grabbed to slide it it releases like nothing else i've seen. it's both slippery and grippy somehow).
hope it helps someone, happy splicing
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