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Mar. 25th, 2007 02:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogI forged my grappling hook this morning. It started as three pieces of round bar stock. I curved one end of each into a hook, then flattened out the tips. I bent the other ends into eyelets. Oops; made one backward from the others. Fixed that. Then I tried to figure out how to bond them together. Hmm.
I had some metal wheels that I'd salvaged from a garage door track. I heated them up and knocked the center post and bearings out of them, then tried wrapping them around the three shafts and hammering them on as a sort of binding strip. That didn't work.
Finally decided that they were too long anyway, so I cut the eyelets off the bars. The shafts were then short enough to fit into my forge (I need a bigger forge!) and I heated them up, bent the ends over just to give me a gripping point, and put them in my vice and twisted them together. Heating and twisting the shafts in sections, I twisted them around each other enough that they seem to be solidly in position. I then fixed the orientation of the hook ends so they were all facing the same way. I had to be careful because once I got them all bent outward and away from each other, that end of the piece was once again too big to fit in the forge.
That done, I decided to forget some of the fancy ideas I had for an eyelet and just put all three of the shaft pieces against the horn of the anvil and made a circle. Yeah, it's crude, but it's effective. I need to learn to use that welder I have; this could have been a lot easier with it, and I'd probably have a better finished product, though not as neat looking a one.
I tied my rope to it in an anchor hitch and made a few test throws in the garage. It grabs the support beams pretty handily and it takes my full weight without complaint. I'm going to tie some climbing knots in the rope and bring it out to Gary next time. I got manila rope with a 600lb working load, so even if the climbing knots reduce the capacity by forty or fifty percent, it should hold me and plenty more gear than I'm going to be climbing a rope with. I think the first field test will be the fourth floor of the Plymouth building. If I fall there, it probably won't kill me. It's too bad I don't have a camera; I'd show y'all a picture of this thing. I figure if it doesn't work out as a grappling hook, I can at least modify it into a three basket plant hanger!
Amusingly enough, I found, after spending about thirty dollars on metal and rope, that I can buy a grappling hook on Ebay for about thirty bucks with shipping. Probably a better one than mine too. Oh well. It's still kind of neat to be able to tell people I made this one myself.
I had some metal wheels that I'd salvaged from a garage door track. I heated them up and knocked the center post and bearings out of them, then tried wrapping them around the three shafts and hammering them on as a sort of binding strip. That didn't work.
Finally decided that they were too long anyway, so I cut the eyelets off the bars. The shafts were then short enough to fit into my forge (I need a bigger forge!) and I heated them up, bent the ends over just to give me a gripping point, and put them in my vice and twisted them together. Heating and twisting the shafts in sections, I twisted them around each other enough that they seem to be solidly in position. I then fixed the orientation of the hook ends so they were all facing the same way. I had to be careful because once I got them all bent outward and away from each other, that end of the piece was once again too big to fit in the forge.
That done, I decided to forget some of the fancy ideas I had for an eyelet and just put all three of the shaft pieces against the horn of the anvil and made a circle. Yeah, it's crude, but it's effective. I need to learn to use that welder I have; this could have been a lot easier with it, and I'd probably have a better finished product, though not as neat looking a one.
I tied my rope to it in an anchor hitch and made a few test throws in the garage. It grabs the support beams pretty handily and it takes my full weight without complaint. I'm going to tie some climbing knots in the rope and bring it out to Gary next time. I got manila rope with a 600lb working load, so even if the climbing knots reduce the capacity by forty or fifty percent, it should hold me and plenty more gear than I'm going to be climbing a rope with. I think the first field test will be the fourth floor of the Plymouth building. If I fall there, it probably won't kill me. It's too bad I don't have a camera; I'd show y'all a picture of this thing. I figure if it doesn't work out as a grappling hook, I can at least modify it into a three basket plant hanger!
Amusingly enough, I found, after spending about thirty dollars on metal and rope, that I can buy a grappling hook on Ebay for about thirty bucks with shipping. Probably a better one than mine too. Oh well. It's still kind of neat to be able to tell people I made this one myself.
