Bill Hansen : looking for more things to test in the Switch labs ?
If a sleeved & stitched flying line termination fails at about a 260 kg load and a spliced & stitched termination fails at about 305 kg, how about testing my combination of these two terminations incorporating the best of each ( strength of the spliced connection + abrasion protection for the loop ) ?
For 700# kite-line, I'm currently running 14 cm of the tail buried, end-cut with about a 1 cm taper, and 12 cm loop length covered by 12 cm of sleeving ( lightly stretched ). About half of that sleeving is 2-point zig-zag stitched with Tex-45 Dabond at 15 spi and about 10 cm of the splice straight-stitched at 8 spi. Also the transition from splice to sleeving is wrapped in marker tape prior to stitching.
Perhaps with the tape and stitching at the eye of the splice maybe the stress concentration at this point will be eliminated ? Or to better mimic the whipping sailors use at the eye the stitching at the tape should be increased , to say 25 spi. Although if your flying line is 700# test, then a 305 kg failure is already at 96% of test, so maybe even without any support at the eye of the splice, it's pretty much as strong as it can get.
Your thoughts or comments as always would be greatly appreciated.