Viking Deadeyes
 

Hi all,
I have misplaced some old drawings of a lovely, clever method to tighten rope standing rigging on small craft. Essentially it's deadeye version of a chain binder; you reeve the rope through a roughly triangular deadeye-type fitting, get what slack out by hand that you can, lever the pointy end of the deadeye up, thus further tightening the rope, and then secure all in place by sliding a ring down.
If this sounds remotely familiar to anyone out there, I'd be grateful to hear about it. Been scouring my mind and my files to no avail.
Fair leads,
Brion Toss

I believe what you are thinking about is known as a shroud needle

pic here about 3/4 of the way down the page

http://www.hurstwic.org/history/arti...orse_ships.htm

I'm sure i have a more detailed pic in a book somewhere, just finding it is a bit of a challenge ;)

p.s you could try contacting these people http://www.vikingeskibsmuseet.dk/index.php?id=1246&L=1 I remember hearing something about them having problems with the shroud needles breaking on one of their replicas, Sea Stallion

I don't recall Brion's pic but there's a guy on the WoodenBoat Forum who is a rigger in San Francisco (I think) who does big ship and historic rigs. He has a nifty sort of bent off-set gizmo for the final tightening.

I've only set up deadeyes on smaller boats (20 tons or so) where hand snugging the lee shrouds a little at a time tack to tack did a nice job.

He’s Jamie White aka Clyderigged.
415 786-5673
jamie@theSquareRigger.com

Somewhere he has pix.

Ian snugging up deadeyes on the lee shroud is a terrible way to set up rigging....... just plain wrong, i get really miffed with people i've done rigging work for when they do this.

P.s Clyderigged is a member of this forum too ;)

In another deadeye thread here I mentioned that I hesitated to mention setting up by taking in lee slack since it really is wrong. Here's the thing - Why wrong? Because it's really easy to set the rig up slanted (which really the wind does not care about too much) or with the mast out of athwartships column. Absolutely one should not fine tune this way if you have turnbuckles or if you have tools. But if you've no tools and a sloppy rig and if you make in less than half the available slack on each tack, monitoring the colum and testing for centering, it can be done. Slow and easy.

Anyway, I hope Jamie or someone finds his pictures of the gizmo. It's cool.

G'luck

REALLY slow way to do it, much quicker and safer to do it on the dock side using the throat halyard with maybe another tackle to increase the purchase......... and as for tools you'd need the same tools when doing it the wrong way ;)

anyone with any idea of good rigging practice wouldn't consider going to sea with slack rigging, the potential shock loading induced on the rig when tacking a loose rig is huge even in light airs, all that banging and crashing about will soon shake something loose and is just not worth the risk

Plus there is much less chance of going for a swim when setting up the rig in the berth :)

Firstly, oOdunkOo has the broader professional experience. Mine is limited to sailboats up to 20 tons. Secondly, as I've stated, I hesitated. Should have kept my fingers off the keys.

The very few rigs with deadeyes I've fiddled with did not have a berth and were happily being sailed by owners who really had no clue as to how out of whack their rigs were. We did the initial set up at anchor but the mid and upper shrouds all seemed to have different stretchiness - maybe just the soft eyes settling around the mast but more likely because heaving up on a deadeye is hard to know exactly how the tension works out.

Anyway, after initial set up on a light sail the lee shrouds were way to loose and the balance between uppers and lowers was wrong, giving the mast an athwartships curve. Gently taking out some but not all slack on the lee side, tacking to see how that was and to take a bit off the other side. Lightish winds in the lee of land so no waves. These were just plain gaff rigs, not even top masts with only about 700 feet in the largest sail and, as I say, the owners had been plodding about anyway. For the schooners I did, took maybe an hour and a half. For the cutter and sloop, maybe an hour. All in pleasant sailing.

I have no doubt that a pro could have achieved the same result faster with a broad experience base and without having to take the time to check the results empiraclly as I did.

Still in all, it's not the preferred way.