Barak,
Hey I like your Maru Dai! And that's excellent about how to do the second half of the split cradle. I've only experimented with the traditional design, and your method makes sense! Wrapping down hill is not easy.
Ok, the thing with whips is that it's easiest to just copy someone elses work. Even the best whipmakers brag about how they have a Henderson or a King stockwhip in their collection and have figured out the great secret of how to make the perfect stockwhip by doing this and that, etc....
I learned the hard way over 8 years. It took me 7 years to really figure out how to make a well balanced australian bullwhip on my own without copying anyone elses work. The fact is I didn't know who was living who could do it. It's hard to get info and know who to trust and, I started back before I had internet.
Ron's book won't tell you much about whip taper, but Morgan's book gives hints. All in all, there's a lot too it, but you don't need to worry about it, just make something that looks about right, and I'm sure it will work great for you.
Point to point cracking is a term I use to describe multiple cracking techniques that involve volleys from one side to another. Perhaps you've seen or heard, or maybe can even do, volleys or 4 corners style cracking? Basically the whip cracks in front and then you pull it to the back to crack behind you, and then say to the front again, and then over you left shoulder. John Brady's video will illustrate for you if you haven't seen it before.
American bullwhips, and more cheaply made whips of any variety, Australian or American, can't do that sort of thing. They do what I call swing and cut cracking. That's where you swing the whip up in one direction and then cut it back in the opposite direction to make it crack. All decent whips can do this, but only the best ones are capable of point to point aswell as swing and cut. Don't get me wrong though, many whips aren't made for point to point. American bullwhips just don't have that purpose behind them, nomatter how well made.
In point to point cracking, a whip that isn't balanced and weighted just right, will have too much recoil at the end, or too much weight to be maneuverable, or be too weak to pull off a crack in the lower powered moves, or not handle right in the air, or jolt the wrist about, or wear the arm out after only a few cracks.
If you're interested in complex multiple cracking, it's best to just buy a good stockwhip from one of the better Australian whipmakers. The way you travel that shouldn't be hard. Otherwise I'd just recommend not worrying about trying to make the perfect point to point whip.
Well balanced whips that are designed for this complex point to point cracking are not necessarily the most powerful whips around. They tend to be lighter in weight and less powerful, though very efficient. 16 plait is common because it's dense and aerodynamic.
This whole subject of whip tapers and balance is some guarded secret in whipmaking. So is "cutting out." Atleast historically. The masters would get the apprentices plaiting, but never cutting out. So when they turned them out on their own, they were no competition for the masters. Raw deal. Cutting out is the hard part. I say that whip tapers is a guarded secret, but honestly it iisn't. It's just that nobody knows why their whips are so good, and even if they did know, they would keep it secret anyway.
If that whip kit is all cut out, then I'm sure it will go together nicely for you. If you want more of a challenge and a less nice end product, go it alone with Ron's book.
I personally, kept graphs as records of my research on whip tapers and honestly I've forgotten most of what I ever knew. I haven't been making whips for some time, because of a wrist injury. There's a whole physics behind it and it's just a matter of building a lot of whips, taking them out and trying them, and trying to figure out what does and doesn't work right. The point (end of the plaiting) should be long, but not too long. The section that comes out of the handle should drop off weight pretty quickly, but not too quickly. And then there are whips that are too light. They just snap, they don't crack. Honestly, I just barely figured it out and never really mastered it. I also have found out that there is more than one way to accomplish this same goal. Henderson's whips (which are supposedly the best ever made) are all wako in my judgement. They shouldn't work. But they do.
Anyway, I do have basic whip tapers figured out and I'll give you a run down here.
For a basic whip, you're dealing with one thing, air friction.
Air friction increases exponentially with velocity. So counterintuitively, the slower your whip moves through the air, the more powerful the crack will be. I'm not kidding. I'm not talking about throwing lightly, I mean all else being equal, the slower your action, the more powerful your crack.
Whips with fast actions, are whips that drop off a lot of weight early on, and thus a great part of the whip moves at a pretty high speed. As it is doing this, a lot of the energy is bled off by the air friction, and thus the crack is less powerful.
A Morgan bullwhip on the otherhand, carries it's weight way out into the thong. The whip moves slower as a result and saves energy. Then in the later sections, the weight drops off more rapidly, and the inevitable air friction comes into play. But the increase in efficiency is great enough to really improve the whip's power, and it tells when you hear the sonic boom.
Everything with slings and whips is a compromise. I make a fast whip that has little power, or a slow whip that blows your ears out.
For point to point cracking, say I make a fast whip that I can do fancy work with, but it hardly cracks. I dislike the lack of power so I make a slower whip and it's too heavy and I can't pull off that special trick crack I was trying to do. So then I make a lighter whip of the same speed, and it doesn't have enough power again. And so I make a heavier whip with a fast action and it is too heavy and fast for me to be able to reverse it's direction at the speed it's traveling. It can give you a headache. With stockwhips you can vary the handle length considerably, to balance the whip. I've seen stockwhips with handles between 16" and 21." But with Australian bullwhips, the handle length is set when you start the things. That makes it harder.
So what we can control here, even if we don't understand tapers completely, is this. The overall weight of the whip, and the density of the plaiting.
The heavier the whip the more power, in general. The denser the plaiting, the more power.
But the heavier the whip, the harder it is to use. For this reason I don't recommend lead loading. It's not needed on a well made whip. Just keep it dense and taper it smoothly and it works well. There's no magic to it.
Stockwhips use lighter thongs and longer handles. They start off faster, are faster, and are less efficient at making loud cracks. But since that's not their only objective, they do what they do well. There's a balance to everything and stockwhips are very good whips if you know how to use them. And I'm saying this as an American.
Trust me, if you stay within reasonable bounds, you won't go wrong. If the plaiting is dense and tight, and the shape is whiplike, it'll crack
I hope that helps, it was just a rant, and I hope it made sense.
Ben