Entry 41. The card index now runs to 118 slips, one splice per slip, cross-referenced by trade. The card that started the whole business says "long splice / drawing splice / running splice / stretch splice" in four different hands of my own, four different years, and none of them wrong. A miller called it a drawing splice because it had to pass through a sheave hole. A hay-baler man in the same county called it a stretch splice because it lengthened the line rather than shortening it. Same splice. Twelve inches of tuck either side of the marry.
My rule for the index is that a name only earns a slip if I heard it used by someone who did the work, or found it printed in a manual before 1948. Second-hand recollection goes on the back of the slip in pencil, not the front.
Tallow came in because of a coil of three-strand manila, 14mm, that I bought at a farm sale in March 2024 for eleven pounds. It had been dressed with something and the strands had gone stiff and slightly waxy on the outside while staying soft in the heart. Cut a foot off, unlaid it, smelled it. Mutton fat and something resinous. That sent me looking.
The old dressing I have settled on is rendered beef tallow with about one part in six of beeswax, melted together at low heat and brushed on warm, then worked in with a rag while the line is under a little tension. On a test length of 12mm sisal I used 90 grams of the mixture over four metres. It absorbed nearly all of it in two days. Weighed the piece before and after: 412 grams up to 478 grams.
Over eighteen months hanging in an unheated shed, the dressed sisal stayed noticeably more supple than the undressed control from the same coil. The control had gone hairy and had picked up a grey bloom of mildew along one metre near the floor. Dressed piece, none. I am not claiming the tallow stopped the mildew on its own. The dressed piece was hanging six inches higher.
Smell is the drawback nobody mentions. Warm shed in July and the dressed line smells like a butcher's back room. Two visitors have commented on it unprompted.
Slip 77 is the one I keep returning to. The eye splice that riggers call a tucked eye, that a theatre flyman I spoke with in Whitby called a hard eye whether or not it carried a thimble, and that a quarry man near Buxton insisted was simply "an eye" with any further name being a townie affectation. He was 79 and had spliced wire for thirty of those years. I wrote his version on the front of the slip.
Still unresolved: whether the back splice and the crown splice were ever genuinely distinct, or whether one term simply crowded out the other around the 1930s. I have printed evidence both ways and no living voice to settle it.