Making Your Own Soft Shackles

[seandepagnier]

Anyone make their own soft shackles or hanks? What are some good designs? I made a drill lathe, and I can quickly make the type in the image.

[daddle]

Very cool. You are clever. Did the shavings taste good in that soup next to the drill motor?

[Sailmonkey]

What plastic are you using? I made a pair with some acrylic rod and a few feet of dyneema I had laying around........I was awfully proud of myself, dyneema spliced into loops, perfect spool shapes on the rod............the rod exploded when I loaded up the spinnaker!!!

[seandepagnier]

This is HDPE which is strong, but maybe not enough for spinnakers. I could use delrin which is much stronger, and also possibly drill the holes slightly offcenter which would reduce pressure on the piece.

[JiffyLube]

Originally Posted by geckosenator

This is HDPE which is strong, but maybe not enough for spinnakers. I could use delrin which is much stronger, and also possibly drill the holes slightly offcenter which would reduce pressure on the piece.

That was very ingenious how you made that lathe...I'll have to remember that!

[allene222]

I made two different styles of soft shackles that used just 1/8 inch Amsteel and nothing else. To test, I connected them to a straight piece of 1/8 inch Amsteel with eye splice terminations. I pulled hard with a 34 power winch and 3:1 tackle (100:1 total). The straight Amsteel broke, not the shackle. Then I wrote it all up in 6 pages counting the 2 pages on the diamond knot. Soft Shackles

I use some made from 3/16 Amsteel on jib sheets with eye splices. Getting rid of the bowline increases the breaking strength almost 2:1.

Allen

[conachair]

Originally Posted by allene222

I made two different styles of soft shackles that used just 1/8 inch Amsteel and nothing else. To test, I connected them to a straight piece of 1/8 inch Amsteel with eye splice terminations. I pulled hard with a 34 power winch and 3:1 tackle (100:1 total). The straight Amsteel broke, not the shackle. Then I wrote it all up in 6 pages counting the 2 pages on the diamond knot. Soft Shackles

I use some made from 3/16 Amsteel on jib sheets with eye splices. Getting rid of the bowline increases the breaking strength almost 2:1.

Allen

I made one out of 9mm tech 12




The biggest loadcell I could get my hands on was 2.5tonne, shackle was fine, knot is well bedded in now





Out of interest, where did the amsteel break? What sort of eyesplces did you use?

[bewitched]

We use them on the race boat - super spendy, so building them yourself definately makes sense.

In terms of design concept, ours are a bit different to yours.

You have one, which attaches 2 jib sheets and clew together.

We have two - one on the end of each jib sheet. Reason is for tack-changes:
- take off lazy sheet and attach to new sail
- hoist new sail
-tack
-drop old sail
- take sheet from old sail and attach to new one

[conachair]

Youtube on making them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH66tGsWv_Y

[unbusted67]

Nice video. That is awesome.

[allene222]

Originally Posted by conachair

Out of interest, where did the amsteel break? What sort of eyesplces did you use?

I used two different types of eye splices. One was a tuck and stitch as Samson recommends. The second was a McDonald brummel splice that I wrote up here: Brummel

The line broke right in the middle, in the section of line not involved in either splice. The splices are much stronger than the line. People say that a splice only gives you 90% of line strength. I am sure it gives you more than line strength. I didn't even have grommets, just the soft shackle through the eye.

You can see all this on the page on testing on my web site. Soft Shackles. I should have called that page soft shackle testing instead of just soft shackle. There is a video of the testing on it.

Just a caution. If you follow the directions in the Colligomarine video your soft shackle will be too small to use for jib sheets. There is a calculator app on my howto page Soft Shackles where you can enter the length of shackle you want and it will tell you how to make the splice. Or you can experiment like I did before writing the app.

We switch jib sheets when we switch sails so one shackle is enough.

Allen

[Bash]

Originally Posted by geckosenator

I made a drill lathe, and I can quickly make the type in the image.

I'm guessing your Bristol 27 is the only one on the West Coast with its own lathe.

[Weyalan]

I downloaded the Colligo Marine U-tube video (shown above), and made some soft shackles as shown. I started off with some old core out of some double braid, so I could get it down-pat without wasting expensive high-tech rope. Once I was confident I purchased some Dynex and made a couple for our headsail sheets. They seem to work really well.