Rope Stropped Blocks

While waiting for my paint to cure, I decided to play with making some blocks. Considering the price of Harken, the number of blocks needed and how silly carbonfiber-plastic-ball-bearing blocks would look on a big gaffer, I concluded rope-stropped blocks were the way to go. Steve Miller, a backyard hardwood miller, in the Columbia gorge had some big chunks of black locust that he wanted to get rid of that looked like they would do just the trick. I marked out the blocks, drilled the hole for the spindle, mortised out a slot for the sheave, and cut the profiles on the bandsaw. Rounded over all the corners with the router and roughly cut the groove for the strop with the router as well. Some minimal hand shaping and they took a week long dunk in some boiled linseed oil. I made the sheaves out of ultra high molecular weight polyethylene by cutting them out with a hole saw and cutting the groove in with a small microplane while the sheave was chucked up on the drill press. A couple sites that I used for ideas are
www.eclectica.ca/boatbuilding/blocks.php
home.flash.net/~ralbers/pulleyblocks.htm www.duckworksmagazine.com/articles/woodenblocks/woodenblocks.htm