A thimble splice is a great way to form a loop in the end of a line that's going to
be subject to chafe and wear.
One such is the connection between an anchor rode and an anchor chain.
To form a splice you'll need a few tools.
Obviously I've got the line itself, a thimble that is the same diameter and is actually
marked as the same diameter as the line, in this case it's half an inch, some electrical
tape, some whipping twine, a fid or a spike, and a pair of sharp scissors.
I'm using nylon line because it's got some stretch in it.
This is going to be for an anchor rode.
The first thing I do is take my thimble and I roughly measure five times the length down
the rope.
There's one, two, three, four, five.
At that point, to stop it from unraveling while I do the splice, I'm going to use some
waxed whipping twine.
Wrap it round a couple of times like so.
And then tie it tightly.
Some people like to use plastic tape or masking tape.
I like whipping twine because you can actually leave it in place and it doesn't affect the
appearance of the splice itself.
Just tie that off like so.
And then we just snip the ends off.
So I'm going to prep the ends of the line ready to make the splice.
I just bought this, and you'll notice they put a bit of tape on there just to hold it
together.
First things first, we'll cut that off.
Sometimes you'll find that they melt the ends.
If they melt the ends, we'll need to cut that off because it's a hard lump.
We just pull this tape off and you'll notice that the rope already wants to come unraveled.
To keep all that together, I've precut three pieces of plastic electrical tape.
I'm going to take each one in turn and wrap that around.
It keeps everything neat and it means that as I form the splice, these are easy to poke
through the rope.
I've put the thimble into the line.
You can see that it fits nice and snugly in there.
And you'll see that the whipping twine is right here.
So what I'm going to do now is unravel this line all the way up to that whipping twine.
This is the uppermost strand here, and I'm going to take this uppermost strand and I'm
going to go underneath the uppermost strand on the other side of the line, adjacent to
the thimble.
So, this one here is going to go under this one here.
You can see a little red and yellow tracer in there, and that's handy.
I'm going to go ahead and get the first tuck in there.
This is fairly soft line and you should be able to do this with your fingers.
If you have difficulty or the rope's stiff or you've got not-very-strong fingers, then
you can open it up with the fid that I showed you earlier.
So let's get the first tuck in there.
I take the next strand here and do the same thing.
I open that up with my fingers and put the second tuck through.
Just pull that through.
Next thing is to flip the thimble over.
This is my last line now, and you can see there's one here, the standing part is going
to go over there and under this strand here.
Just like braiding hair, I guess.
So I've done now four complete tucks or under and overs.
One, two, three, four ... and we're going to do the last one, now, five.
That's enough.
It's going under that one, over this one here, and then under this one.
So we just pull that up.
Keep it pulled up as you go, we want to keep it nice and neat.
That's one.
This strand here goes over this one, under this one.
Open that up, tuck it through, and I think now you can see that having the plastic tape
on the end makes it easier because it keeps everything together.
Two.
Last one.
So we're going to go over this one, under this one.
So now I've done that, I'm just going to smooth that down with my hand, make sure it's all
nice and neat, pull it all up tight.
There we go.
Then I've got these three strands.
What I'm going to do now is just cut these off.
You'll notice that I've finished the splice and I've got three ends here that I've just
trimmed off.
You'll notice that they're a little longer than they need to be.
You could trim them right back tight, but then there's a chance that they're going to
slip back through.
I like to leave them a little long.
You can just leave it like that, and it will be perfectly fine.
Or some people like to scorch a little bit with a match or a lighter just to melt this
back in.
As I said, this is for an anchor.
I'm just going to leave it like that.
It's perfectly fine.
So there we have it: a nice, neat finished splice.