Hi All,
Just a few (Fuzzy) shots of Craven member?s busy measuring and cutting over 1 kilometre of rope. This will then be used to rig the trade routes into the Gaping Gill system for Eurospeleo.

blimey!

Summer is on its way!!     
Thank you Spanset for that lovely rope.

Always nice to see a large pile of rope and wonder where it will end up and what adventures await - hopefully Eurospeleo will just be the start of the story for that lot.
Enjoy
Wardy

Only issue is with that rope its not 1km of rope its 800 - 900m depending on who you believe about the shrinkage. We have found it to have shrunk 12% after being soaked before being put in the cave, where it may shrink further?

Depends whose pitch measurements you used - better make sure there are knots in all ends then (although they may have to be untied to reach the floor).

Mike

Did anyone else's Spanset give off quite a sulphurous odour during the soaking?
Noticed ours did last night, though a final rinse and pulling it through the rope washer removed the smell. Just waiting for it to dry before measuring and cutting next week.
New competition: How long will our 263m rope be now? :-\

Our 230 shrunk to 205m before cutting. Our rope cutter then added another 10% to the lengths in-case they shrink more in the caves, so we are short of two 25m ropes. Even if he had not done that we would still be short one 25m rope.

What's the rule of donating our own club rope, does it have to be Euro Speleo rope?

Gordon tells me we lost 10% after fairly thorough soaking/Drying. 

We are soaking ours at the moment and will measure next week. It is lovely looking rope and can't wait to start rigging! Thanks SpanSet!

Based on several reports, it does seem to be shrinking more than allowed for, however, this shouldn't be problematic as long as the discrepancy is spread proportionally between all individual rope lengths through the cave. The rope lengths everyone has been supplied with are based on those in Northern Caving (formerly the CNCC rigging guide) which in general are generous and assume use of every single anchor in traverse lines etc (which is desirable), and still in my experience result in several metres spare at the bottom of most pitches. However, please do look into rope lengths yourself and if you predict any issues please get in touch with Ian who has been dealing with the rope distribution and we can get this sorted out so nobody is running short.

Rope shrinkage has been discussed on a number of occasions on the forum over the years.

From my experience of cutting new ropes for the Berger trips and measuring and cutting around 10km of rope a year for industry the best advice is soak, dry, measure, add 10% and cut. Although the initial shrinkage may vary from around 3% - 12%, the total amount of shrinkage after conditioning and use is rarely more than 15%. 

Mark

Yeh that's what we did, hence why we lost 20%

I wonder if the amount of shrinkage depends on where it is spooled onto the drum, for instance, does a cut price 'drum end' shrink more than one taken from the outside of a new drum?

Maybe, with all this rope preparation for eurospelio, it would be a good opportunity to check on this?

bograt said:

I wonder if the amount of shrinkage depends on where it is spooled onto the drum, for instance, does a cut price 'drum end' shrink more than one taken from the outside of a new drum?

Maybe, with all this rope preparation for eurospelio, it would be a good opportunity to check on this?

Click to expand...

The Spanset Gold isn't spooled onto a drum, it's supplied by Teufelberger in 700m boxes. I think the thinner ropes were supplied in smaller sized boxes.

It sounds like everyone is keeping a close eye on shrinkage lengths. Whilst the information will be useful, you can't necessarily transfer it to other rope manufacturers, or indeed different rope diameters by the same manufacturer.

For the first couple of Berger book trips we used a Mammut rope, 2 different Beal ropes and 2 different Petzl ropes, all in a range of diameters. The Petzl ropes were actually manufactured by Beal.

Despite 4 of the ropes being from the same manufacturer, shrinkage varied in the 3% - 12% range I mentioned previously. The maximum amount of shrinkage from an unconditioned state of any of the rope samples, after a lot of use, was 15%.

So, if you add 15% to your required rope length, off the drum or out of the box, you 'should' always have enough rope to get to the bottom of the pitch.  It would be interesting to see how short the rope Alex cut ends up after use and test my rule of thumb. 

I think I'd rather have a couple of extra metres at the bottom than have a big queue of Eurospeleoers having to pass a knot 2m from the floor.

Mark

Wouldn't you rig it with the 2m join at the other end somewhere along the traverse line? at a conveniently positioned anchor 2m from the first 

I agree with Mark; different ropes shrink at different rates and to different extents. The worst I've come across is 16.1% over two years' modest use.