Amy said:
Finally got around to making a little how-to video for how we make our really nice rope ends without a hot knife. Because we be cheap cavers who don't want to spend $150 for a little hot knife.
Personally, I find cheap soldering
guns to be pretty good - they can sometimes need a bit of on/off action with the trigger to avoid the tip heating to ignition point, but I think the last one I bought in Lidl was only about ?10.
Not quite as nice as a 'proper' rope knife, but not too far off, and the working parts heat up (and cool down) fairly quickly.
For an off-grid mountaintop alternative (or even an underground alternative if the rope is dry), cutting tape-wrapped rope with a knife and melting with a jet lighter (a bit like the youtube video) can work rather well.
The dealextreme jet lighters:
http://www.dx.com/p/jet-1300-c-butane-lighter-1320#.V7-I1q3wqdU
can be pretty good.
Their main design fault (button jamming) is generally fixable. They need tuning for flow (screw on the bottom), sometimes the jet needs to be given a hard blow if dust gets into it, and the recent ones have a rubber stand which stinks like tar on a hot summer day but which seems pointless anyway and can be discarded, and they take
ages to arrive - DX always seem to try regular post and then the package gets rejected for airmail because it contains empty lighters and gets sent by alternative means at about the pace of a camel.
Best allow a couple of months for delivery.
But apart from that, they're fine. I usually buy a few, and treat them as semi-disposable, and they're vastly better for many things than normal lighters. They seem to fill with butane well, and hold a decent amount.