Hi.
I'm Mark Corke from BoatU.S. Magazine.
Welcome aboard!
Today I'm going to take you through the steps necessary to splice a loop in the end of a
piece of double braided line.
It's not difficult, and once you practice it, you'll do it very quickly.
It's much stronger than a knot and much neater.
To get started, we have to tie a stopper knot to some secure part of the boat about 15 to
20 feet from the end of the line we're splicing, cause we're going to be pulling on this, and
we need something solid.
So to get started, we take a fid the same diameter as the line, line it up with the
end, and then we put a Sharpie mark on the line.
That's our first mark.
We then decide what size loop we want.
So, from that first mark, I line that up alongside the line.
We've got a loop here.
That's going to be the size of my loop, and I put a second mark . At the second mark,
I open up the cover.
I don't cut anything, but I open up the cover, put a small fid in there and extract the core.
Where I've pulled the core from the cover, I'm going to take my marker and put another
mark on the core.
I'm going to pull out another couple of feet of core.
Take a fid, and I mark two-thirds of a fid-length down there.
This will be my fourth mark.
I've taped up the end of this core to stop it from unraveling and I'm going to poke that
now into a fid that's the same diameter as the core.
And I'm going to be putting that in at the first mark I made on the cover, down inside
away from the bitter end, and come out an inch or so past where the core extracts.
I've taped up the end of the cover and I'm going to wedge that into fid the same diameter
as the cover and then that goes into the core.
Now this is kind of loose so you work your way down very carefully.
And I go down one fid-length.
And I'll bring it out the side.
Now that that's extracted from the core, I can remove the tape on the end.
I'm going to get a small fid and coming back about 3 or 4 inches from the end, we just
tease out some of these strands ... individual strands ... working toward the end.
The reason we do this is because we're going to taper the splice to make it look neater.
Then I just cut these off.
Now I massage the core to ease the transition between the cover and the core.
So to finish this splice up now, we just start milking the cover back over the core, and
you'll see it start to disappear in there.
What I'm doing now is, I'm just working that down, and as you can see, I've buried the
cover inside here.
so we have a nice, neat splice.
The only thing that's left to do is we've got this bit of core hanging out here.
We just pull that back about half an inch, take a pair of scissors, snip that off.
One last tug, and the splice is complete.
So, there you have it.
A nice neat loop at the end of a length of double braid.
Much neater than a knot, and I think you'd agree this is something you'd be proud to
have on your own boat.
So, thanks for watching, give us some comments, let us know what you'd like to see, and for
more information, go to BoatUS.com/Magazine.