Whip Basics. The Forum

Being very careful with finances at the moment, due to many trips and holidays being planned with friends, I haven't found the time or money to start Bringing Home The Rain (my 'dream' cow whip). So instead, I paid £5 to make this monstrosity...



Now, it's not pretty. It's not particularly effective. But it's something I don't think I've ever seen on the forum, or anywhere else: a Mexican chicote whip of an 8 strand TT, with a cow whip style handle. I twisted 8 strands into 4 pairs, then the 4 pairs into two quadruplets, then those two TTs together into a super-TT.

This has got to be the most budget whip ever, even more so than Adam Winrigh's 15 Minute Whip. And yes, it cracks

Ha! That's certainly a novel way to make a whip - and why not? If it cracks....

I'm quite sure that this is closer to the vast majority of whips made over the centuries than the fine modern specimens we're used to seeing on the Forum!

Now that you've made the core what's the end length going to be? ( heh heh heh)

Ron

It's definitely interesting, Robert, and something you could even do on a Bradshaw if you really wanted. This is a real working whip, a quick and cheap one-crack wonder :P.

Haha Ron, the end length would be about 10ft :P. This core's 9ft already

Interesting Matt. A few years ago I followed along with a young whipmaker in Mexico making traditional Chirrion whips out of mecate rope. Yes they can be ugly but are very inexpensive and practical. He stopped publishing his blog at the end of 2012, but there are many interesting tidbits to be found.

https://elasticrods.wordpress.com/about/

Matt, that's definitely a unique design. Its kind of cool looking. I'd be lying if I said I didn't like its appearance.

Quick and dirty is not necessarily bad. I understand that the whips carried by olden time vaqueros were more what you got there and less those Indiana Jones pieces of art. And those guys are who more or less created the American cowboy style we all know and love

Does it crack? If yes, it's a whip.


- Pokkis

Thanks Jeff, that bloke was who I got the idea from incidentally .

Cheers Jesse, I don't like how it looks but it might grow on me. I'm not going to knock it though, two solid hours of twisting rope was worth it .

I know exactly what you mean Pokkis, this one was almost a challenge to see how cheaply and quickly I could make a working whip. Not sure many vaqueros had pink ones though :P

Matt, I took the "cheap, dirty and fast" approach at whips once too, and it resulted in me semi-accidentally making the first prototype of the Redshift whip. Think of it like a "what if" idea that sort of got out of hand, turned out good, and taught me more about whipmaking than any other singular thing ever could. (No, WB doesn't count as "a singular thing", since it's a community with dozens of people from more countries than I'll most likely ever visit.)


- Pokkis

Good way to think about it, I'm learning a lot about how to best arrange a TT analysing this

In my very humble opinion, the best way to see anything is to generously apply Occam's razor. A very simplified explanation for the concept would be that the simplest of the available functional choices is the best unless specificated otherwise. Case in point in form of a thought experiment that you can scale up into most everything you face daily:

BOB: Does it crack?
BILL: Yes.
BOB: It's a whip. Can it take a beating?
BILL: Yes.
BOB: It's a tool whip.

As simple as that. What we so easily forget after seeing Tyler's Dacron goodies, Gio's awesomely beautiful and sleek roohide pieces of art, videos of Bobbi's Valkyrie in flight and the perceived poetry in motion of, Rachel's handmade handles and perfectionism, everything I didn't just mention and still love (you know who you are), is that all that fancy and/or sciencey stuff is mostly just a cherry on a conceptual cake. If it cracks, it's a whip.


- Pokkis