Viking Deadeyes

[Brion Toss]

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

[o0dunk0o]

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

[Ian McColgin]

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.

[Ian McColgin]

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

Somewhere he has pix.

[o0dunk0o]

Originally Posted by Ian McColgin

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.

Originally Posted by Ian McColgin

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

[Ian McColgin]

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