Anyone used this before? Plumbers use it in combination with some sort of glue to seal up threaded pipe connections.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Plumbers-Hemp-200g-Hank-Traditional-Flax-Plumbing-Pip...

You can even get it in a dispenser:
https://www.screwfix.com/p/select-products-hemp-pipe-thread-packer-sealer-80g/93...

Looks like a ready supply of hemp fibre for sling braiding. In fact, because of the annoying habit of people saying hemp when what they mean is just 'natural fibre' I wonder if it really is hemp, they mention flax also which is linen technically. On some videos it even looks like sisal.

Price seems fairly reasonable anyway, I'll buy some to try out.

Interesting. Would be interested to see what sort of quality the material is.

I havent used it for slings yet. The plan was to spin some fine thread and then make a high quality sling but I have left it for the last year collecting dust.
I have used it as a bow backing in 4 bows 1 of them is working and is on a video on my channel , 2 bows are backed but need a lot of tillering, 1 broke in tillering (too much ring violation), bows are also collecting dust right now.
I bought it as flax but says canapa on the label I trust the label more.
seems much better in quality than the cordage sold, it has very long strands.
I would buy it from a hardware store, I have found it on a much better price.

Looks like decent stuff.
It's quite difficult to find stuff that's only the long fibres though, as when you comb the hanks a lot of shorter fibres come out.

I finally got round to processing this stuff. From the 200g hank I got pretty decent results. I extracted bundles of fibre and pruned out shorter/tangled stuff.

Yield was ok- I retained 130g in almost exclusively 60cm strands which should make two decent slings, so £4 per sling, not the cheapest but not terrible either. It's quite difficult to extract this much fibre in 60cm strands, the last time I tried for 60cm with the sisal I have access to, I got something like 20% yield, and it took a very long time indeed. I usually resort to cutting 30cm strands from sisal to drastically boost the yield up to ~60% and reduce the time messing round with the rope.

So it compares pretty well with rope as a fibre source, since it's less labour intensive to get long length fibres in bulk.

I'm not sure if you could use it directly and save that time altogether. You *probably* could, but I personally don't like fiddling with tangled fibre when I have one hand holding the braid tight.

Also, it is indeed hemp, there is no mistaking the smell.

? No

Morphy wrote on Aug 8^th, 2021 at 9:43am:


It doesn't exist yet! I'll post one when I'm done.

Silk might be interesting, I've not used it before. I'll have a look.