Rope Leash!

I take my dogs to a big open part every few days, there's some stunning view and tons of stuff for the doggos to sniff. One of my dogs only has a short leash, it's great for walking in neighborhoods, but when we go to the park, he can't go off and sniff things very easily. Sometimes we let the dogs run around off- leash, but there is still this missing middle-ground of a longer leash hiking and whatnot. I was tempted to go and make one out of leather, but since there was a rope and cordage contest going on, I thought what the heck, lets try to do something novel with rope!

A few years back I was working on the team that developed the industrial design for the Virgin Voyages wearable band thingy. During the project we did a ton of research and experimentation on different ways to secure ends of rope, and I learned a bunch of really neat techniques. The method used in this project can scale up or down pretty easy, so i'd be curious to see if anyone actually ends up playing with it!

In this project I used:

1/2" diameter rope

1in copper tube

snappy fitting thingy thing

jewlers saw

ball peen hammer

sandpaper

metalworking files

power drill

and a small vise!

Little does this copper pipe know, but its going to be the piece that holds all the rope together!
Cut yourself a lil 1.5in-2in section of copper pipe

First thing we got to do with that lil bit of copper is squish it down until the opening narrows to about 1/2in. If you are using a different size tube/rope you just want the tube to be tall enough to snuggly fit the diameter of your cordage through, but wide enough that you can fit two sections of cord side by side in it.

I brought our little copper buddy over to a boating supply store and picked up some nylon diamond braided rope that could fit comfortably inside it. Looks like 11mm would have worked great, but the colors I liked only came in 1/2in.

For this build I am specifically using diamond braid since its exterior is more consistent and less likely to unwind if it's twisted. Also, nylon is ideal since it will melt and fuse when enough heat is applied.

If you are making a lil dog leash, you should definitely have some sort of easy to use thing to attach to your dogs collar/harness

Once I got back to my shop (really its just my back yard), I made a little wooden post for the copper tube to sit on while being drilled/ filed. This will also cut down on the amount of burrs that form on the interior of the tube after drilling.

This step is pretty easy, you can mark out your holes if you like, but I was flying by the seat of my pants for this project, I'm totally wild and reckless over here!

Just be sure to make your holes in a nice straight line down the center, it's very important that they are centered!

Since this piece will be moving around rope, you are going to want to be diligent and remove any and all stray burrs that have appeared. Take your time with this since it would suck to have a burr slowly cut away at your rope, then one day your rope will snap, and your dog will fly off into the woods in search of squirrels. Who knows if you would ever see them again! We don't want that, so make everything nice and smooth to the touch.

Since we can, might as well attempt to make this thing a little more visually interesting than a piece of plain copper pipe. So I'm scoring some lines with calipers just to the side of where the rivets will be. We will be using these lines for various decorative things as we move forward.

Also, calipers work great for making accurate marks on things, some people may look at you with disappointment in their eyes, but not me! That said, I do have one set for measuring, and one cheap one for marking, they get mixed up sometimes though.

Even though I have been making things for a long time now, I still would not call myself an expert engraver, ornamenter, or jeweler. I still need tons more practice, but hey you know what? Life is all about learning, so lets make some grooves here, who cares if they are less than perfect, just do your best and that'll be good enough in my book!

Stick your brass rod though those drilled holes we made earlier. We want just 2-3mm or about 1/8in sticking out on one side, and like 1/2" in or a bit longer on the other side. Using the needle file, make a mark on the brass rod designating where you want this cut to take place. Then whip out your trusty jewelers saw and cut off that little length!

Now that we have our brass rod cut, just chuck it into your drill and start making a taper on the rod. You just need to make sure that your taper isn't so long that you don't have any untapered rod to rivet. If you wanted to make a guiding line, just mark something like 1/4in+ the height of your copper tube from one end of the rod, and don't file past that line!

Very very important, you want a blunt nose to the taper. A sharp nose may tear through the fibers as we push it through, but a blunt nose should just move stuff to the side.

When I bought the rope, the person working there seared the end of it with a neat little soldering iron like thing. The result was super nice, but sadly we need to cut that off since it's too wide and rigid for what we are doing. Once it's cut off just wrap the end with electrical tape making sure to keep it as tight as possible. Wrap the rope end further back than the overall length of your copper tube. This will help prevent the rope from bunching up when we put it in the tube and will make it a little easier to fit through.

Well, it would have made my life a lot easier had I listened to that little nugget of wisdom I gave to you just a moment ago. Since I didn't have enough tape on there, as I pushed on the rope it just started bunching up and wouldn't move at all. Though, now that I think about it, we are pretty much using this exact principle to lock the rope in place with the rivets!

Now for the moment we have all been waiting for! Making this copper tube actually do something!

What we are aiming to do is wedge this little brass rod between the two sections of rope. This will compress them enough that the non compressed sections of rope will actually expand a little, and if you pull in either direction, the rope will just bunch up more providing a ton of resistance. Since we have two of these little wedges with a little bit of space in-between we should greatly amplify just how hard it is to pull rope through this fitting.

As I was working on this part, I found that hammering in the brass rod was less than effective. The best method that I found was simply chucking the brass rod into a drill, and essentially drilling the brass rod through the hole. If you get a little thread coming though on the other end it's not a big deal, less to none is of course going to be better, I won't judge either way though

Using the jewlers saw just nip off the tapered end, leaving about 1/16th in to 1/8th in on both sides of the copper tube. Don't go too much bigger than that since it will take about 6 years to peen the rivets by hand with all that extra material!

Alrighty, just be warned, this part is a bit time consuming, that said, this is also a really fun part.

After your brass rod has been set up with a little bit of extra material sticking out from both sides of the hole, we are going to start hammering with the ball end of a ball peen hammer around the top of the rod in a circular path around the axis of the rod. For this kind of project and with a 1/4" rod you can be pretty liberal with the amount of force per hit. If you end up doing this for other projects just be aware that harder hits on the rod can bend the rod or cause material to mushroom out from the center of the rod. lighter hits will concentrate the deformation around where you are hitting and will reduce any of those unwanted results. Also be aware that as you hammer on the rod, the hammer AND the surface the object is resting on will leave marks on your part.

As I was going around and hammering, the rod kept shifting around on me, so i drilled a quarter inch hole trough some thin-ish brass sheet I had and let the bottom of the pin rest through the hole. This seemed to help prevent the rod from jumping up and generally made the process nicer. A washer would also work just fine for this.

Once the top starts to mushroom a bit on one side, flip it over and start working on the opposing side. Just keep going back and forth until the edge of the mushroom runs as flush as possible with the copper part.

Just like before, we are going to
1) Shove the blunt tapered rod through the hole with a drill
2) Nip off the tapered end of the rod leaving somewhere between 1/8" to 1/16" per side of extra material
2.5) debur the freshly cut side
3) begin peening until both sides of the rivet run smooth with the surface of the copper

Just looking at the copper piece I felt a little underwhelmed by its look so i figured what the hey, lets try the only patina I have on hand.

I first did a little test on some copper wire I had laying around and even though the patina was designed for steel, it looks like it still did some neat stuff to copper.

I sanded up the surface that I was going to patina, and then dabbed on some with a paper towel just so I wouldn't be spreading excess onto the rope, since who knows what it would do to it.

In order to stop the patina process I sprayed the copper down with some good ol' fashioned hose water and wiped it dry.

Since the patina also darkened the rivets I thought it might be a good idea to sand off the patina on the rivets so that they would pop a little more. I used a little masking tape to keep the sanding isolated to just the pins, however I ended up just sanding the whole thing anyway. It still made markings on the copper a bit more visible which I really liked, so i'll see if I can expand on that later.

Time to move onto the other side of the rope!

After establishing a good length for the leash I went ahead and wrapped the end with electrical tape, this time I just went a little further so I could pass it through a little easier.

Ok now just like before, we are going to pass through those tapered pins and rivet them into place!

But these copper bits feel a lil plain, needs a lil something.

The patina that was left over reminded me of some pieces of fine Japanese metalsmithing, so I wanted to try to emulate the feeling of those pieces. From memory, they had what looked like random patterns of hammered dots, to kind of matte out the surface and to leave different areas of texture.

I just used a pointed punch I had made a long time ago in order to apply the texture. Just keep the tip of the punch a hair above the surface of the copper and tap it. It barely takes any pressure at all to make marks in the copper. If the punch is kept floating a little above the copper it makes it substantially faster to mark the entire surface.

This whole process was done to both of the copper fittings. If you decide to try this out, its really fun to do, and a great way to just get creative with texture. If you are more adventurous you could do some carvings or inlay to really make this a standout piece!

Only after I finished this whole project up did i realize that some of the pieces I was thinking of were actually very deliberate in their patterning, here are some examples of what I was going for:
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/KNH87F/sword-guard-tsuba...

https://www.jimkelso.com/archives/images/jk18w.jpg

https://www.jimkelso.com/archives/images/jk8w.jpg

After adding all those marks I went back in with the patina and applied another pass of it to the fitting and sanded the top surface after it was applied and washed. This left over a more interesting texture to the fitting that started to let you forget that this was made from a humble piece of copper pipe.

As we come to a close, all we need to do now is trim off the taped sections and singe the ends so that the plastic fibers fuse together.... only....since the rope was wet, it just wouldn't fuse...

Back on that Virgin Voyages project we were working with little elastic cords and found that if you tried to singe the ends of that, the rubber core wouldn't melt together with the exterior fabric. To get around this we found that a lil drop of superglue on the end would seal it just as well as if you singed it! I thought, what the heck, maybe that will work!

I taped around the rope to make sure the end would be nice and tight when it was glued, and then added a big glob of super glue and waited. Usually the glue fuses within seconds...a minute passed by and no luck. In a panic I thought I should just try to singe the end again only to find out that the super glue that had pooled up actually stayed lit for a while! Turns out superglue is flammable, who knew! Anyway, since the glue stayed on fire for a while, it gave the rope enough time to burn and singe together, so it all worked out in the end!

This was a really fun project and even if you don't end up making this leash I hope you gained a couple new skills and ideas that will help you down the line!

I'll be entering this into the rope and cordage contest and I hope I have earned your vote! Even if I haven't, I sincerely hope you have a stellar day! Thanks!