Whipping knot
| Portuguese whipping | |
|---|---|
| Category | Whipping |
| Related | reef knot |
| Typical use | To prevent a rope from fraying |
A whipping knot or whipping is a binding of marline twine or whipcord around the end of a rope to prevent its natural tendency to fray. The whipping can be made neat and permanent by tying it off or sewing the ends of the twine through the rope .
Whipping is suitable for synthetic and natural stranded and braided ropes, lines and cables, including 3-strand rope, 4-strand cable and 8-strand multiplait as well as concentric and braided constructions.
Multiple turns of twine (sometimes called small stuff for smaller lines) or heavier whipcord (for large diameter cables and ropes) are tightly wrapped around a rope's cut end to prevent its fibers from unlaying.
Usually one end of the whipping cord is looped along the rope to be whipped, and the remaining cord wound tightly over the loop. Finally the loose end of the wound whipping is passed through the loop so that both ends may be drawn securely inside the winding.
Whippings may also be applied by hand or using a palm and needle, and either simply tied off or made neat and permanent by reeving the twine's cut ends into or behind the whipping, sewing them to adjacent strands, or through the rope itself.
In applications where a lot of flexing is expected the whipping may be impregnated with dilute spar varnish or superglue.
French whipping is a whipping knot that consists of a series of half hitches. It is used to stop unraveling of rope ends as well as to provide a grip over railings.
The Portuguese whipping is a type of whipping knot. To make it you take the small diameter string and lay one end against the rope. Wrap backwards up the rope until you have both ends side by side, finish by tying a reef knot. This is the quickest of the seizings, but is not as secure as some.
A constrictor knot can be used temporarily to hold the fibres of a cut line until a final whipping can be applied.
Several turns of self-adhesive plastic tape may form a temporary or emergency substitute for whipping.
The ends of some man-made fibers such as Dacron, Nylon, polyethylene, polyester, and polypropylene may be melted to fuse their fibers to prevent fraying. However, the rope and knotting expert Geoffrey Budworth warns against this practice thus:
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