Comment by Aardwolf
6 hours ago
Rope is one thing that I wonder how to make from scratch if you'd be dropped somewhere in nature. I know it's about weaving plant fibers, but, how can it get so long?
6 hours ago
Rope is one thing that I wonder how to make from scratch if you'd be dropped somewhere in nature. I know it's about weaving plant fibers, but, how can it get so long?
Same way you weave together yarn. The individual fibers bind together with weaving and friction and form a longer chain.
When I was 5 I watched my grandmother making yarn using a foot-powered castle wheel. The machine rotates a string of yarn along its long axis and it collects fibers from a piece of loose wool (roving) thus extending itself. I think I've seen a drop spindle too, but I'm less certain about that.
Here's how: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfaLUi-qtnA
I've wondered the same thing. The fibers aren't that long.
The fibers don't need to be long. About 1 inch is enough for any purpose. The trick is to twist each fiber individually in one direction (fe. clockwise) while twisting them around each other in the opposite direction (fe. counter-clockwise). This creates internal tension that makes the fibers push against each other with substantial force, creating sufficient internal friction for them to bind against each other. And now you have string, and you again switch twist direction to bind multiple strings together to make thicker string, a switch again to bind multiple of those together, etc, until you get to proper rope thickness, which is basically always substantially thicker than the length of the fibers that make it.
It's a bit magical when you figure out how to do it, it doesn't seem to make any sense yet it works.
It’s the trick where people would take two phone books and if you interleave every page you can literally have two cars going each direction and can’t rip them apart. Ropes are this on a smaller scale.
You take short fibers, and twist and splice them together to get longer fibers. And you repeat until you get the desired length, or thickness...
Lots of videos of how to make it on the Internets using nettle, or some other plant (flax is still used to make clothes today though through industry methods).
We made rope in boy scouts. You just need to braid three strings and you can splice in broken bits pretty easily. You can also work out kinks with just regular straight sticks and it only takes two people. The theory that these batons were for rope seems unlikely in that regard. Apparently the leading hypothesis is for spear throwing.