My first double braided eye splice - what am I doing wrong?

[Dave Cole]

Imagine my surprise when I found the same thing with my new 600 ft roll of 1/4" Sta-Set.

The story is very similar; I could not fit a fid with a core into the jacket with the other core present, when making the official New England Double Braid eye splice, no matter how much I tried to expand the cover. I don't have a Micro or Small wand, just some fids. I really like the design of the wands - a very clever design, but none here.

I ended up using a length of thin iron wire commonly known as mechanics wire. It is probably about 16/18 gauge wire. I cut a length of wire about 2 1/2 feet long and folded it in half back onto itself. I used pliers to make the bend fairly sharp. I used this wire loop as a threader. (Think - threading a needle) I pushed the folded end of the wire loop into the cover at the core exit point and pushed it out of the cover at the splice crossover point. I fanned the end of the core and slid it into the "eye" of the wire loop with about 1/2 of the fan sticking out the side of the loop. The wire loop was pinched tight enough at the end to allow the core to be grabbed by the wire loop as tension was applied. Then I could quickly pull the core into the cover and out the exit point with little effort. This worked much better than I expected, and did not require any tape to secure the core to the wire pulling loop. The wire loop worked so well pulling the core into the cover, I used the same wire loop to pull the cover into the core (again without tape). I've done several splices now on this small 1/4" Sta-Set rope using this technique with great success. Thanks for the inspiration!