The Incredible Rope-Making Machine

Image Gallery PHOTO 1: Side view of the Incredible Rope-Making Machine shows how the "throw" of each crank fits between two boards of machine.

We still don't know how to tell Don A. McKay (see Mother Earth News, No. 41, Page 7) to use up the excess baling wire he's been accumulating on his Washington State ranch. But Travis Brock, who recently joined the Mother Earth News research and editorial staff, certainly knows what to do with the mountains of baler twine that constantly pile up on farms and ranches from sea to shining sea.

"Turn that string into rope," says Travis. "It's easy to do—darn near automatic, in fact—once you've spent about an hour putting together the very simple, yet extremely effective, rope-making machine I saw working on a ranch near The Dalles, Oregon."

THE INCREDIBLE ROPE-MAKING MACHINE'S BASIC PRINCIPLE AND HOW TO MAKE IT WORK FOR YOU

The secret of the Incredible Rope-Making Machine is nothing but a few hooks (we like three, but you can use as many or as few as you like) that can be turned at the same time, at the same speed and all in the same direction. This isn't nearly as difficult to accomplish as it might sound.

Scrounge up some 1/8-inch steel rod and cut off three pieces, each eight inches long. (NOTE: The specifications given in this article are for the three-hook machine shown in the accompanying black and white photos. You can change them—within reason—to match whatever materials you have on hand, however, without affecting the output of your rope-maker one bit.)

Form the rods into three identical "Z's" that look like old-timey automobile cranks (see sketch). The dimensions shown in the image gallery are somewhat arbitrary. It really doesn't matter a great deal whether the central "throw" of the three cranks is 1-3/4" or 2-1/4". Nor does it matter if you eventually set those cranks into your machine's boards in the triangle pattern we used, in a straight line or in some completely random pattern.

For smoothest operation of the finished machine, however, it is quite important that the two main bends in each crank be precisely 90° each and that all three "throws" — whatever they measure — be exactly the same length. It's also important that the three holes in the board "handle"—NO MATTER WHAT THEIR PATTERN—line up exactly with the three holes in the board used for the main body of the rope-maker(try clamping the slabs of wood together and drilling each set of matching holes through both thicknesses at the same time).