Ranger, whip #28, is an 8 ft Kangaroo hide bullwhip. I wanted to do an all kangaroo hide whip, including core and bolsters. The handle is a 10″ (254 mm) long, 1/4″ (6.35 mm) spring steel rod with a rebate ground at one end. The core is kangaroo hide that I split to a bit less than 1 mm thick and tied to the handle with artificial sinew. There is 3 small strands of roo hide of different lengths bound inside the core. the core is bound with a combination of closed and open binding. Then I tied a bolster over this and bound it with open binding except for about 6 inches each side of the transition.  I split all the lace down to a little 1 mm to see if i can avoid some o f the problems I had on the last whip.

Handle

Core tied onto the handle and bound with artificial sinew

Handle core and 1st bolster bound with artificial sinew.

The 1st belly is a 6 plait, about 3.5 ft long, ending in a 4 plait. The strands were cut  to 6 ft and tapered from 7 mm to 4mm. I tried beveling from opposite edges this time, instead of both bevels from the flesh side and I like the way it looks. The strands were split to a bit under 1 mm and I had no problems with breaking.

This is a close op of the 6 plait (o2u1 on one side and o1u2 on the other.) I really like the way that beveling one edge on the flesh side and one edge on the hair side looks and lays.

Here’s the strands cut and beveled and split for the 2nd belly.  And yes, there is one black strand in there, I was 10 ft short of having enough of the whiskey to do the belly. Also there was a second bolster between the 1 st and 2nd bellies, but I neglected to take a photo of it somehow.

The second belly, an 8-plait- it’s starting to feel like a whip now. The handle is 15.5 mm in diameter and the whip is now about 5.5 ft (1.68 m)long, tapering down to about 5.3mm at the tail end. The transition on this belly was bound with open binding from the heel to about 2 ft past the transition.

The 3rd belly is a 10 plait. There was no bolster between the 2nd and 3rd bellies because I felt the whip was getting thicker than I wanted at this point. The 3rd belly was bound with open binding to about three feet past the transition.

The overlay a 12 plait starting off with a diamond plait, changing to 4 wide bands for the middle 3rd of the handle, then back into the diamond plait. The transition is to a short herringbone that ends in a couple of rows of bird’s eyes and then into a regular herringbone. The pattern changes would be a lot more obvious with two colors, but I really like the texture changes that they provide with a singe color. The heel knot is a 8p5b, 2-pass Casa (or Turk’s head) knot, the knots holding the brass collar in place are 4×5 Casa knots. The whip ends in an 8 plait at the fall hitch.  The lace at the heel is about 7 mm and at the fall hitch it is a little less than 4 mm. This is the first time I’ve done a 12 plait overlay. One of the main advantages of cutting your own lace is that you can taper it and, since I started with a 12 plait and ended with an 8 plait, there were only 2 drops in the 8 foot whip to deal with.The lace for the knots was cut to 4 mm. All the lace was beveled so that one bevel was on the flesh side and one was on the hair side of the hide and was split to a bit less than 1 mm. The fall is 30 inches of 10 oz latigo. The cracker is dyneema.