Rope Bookshelf (pictured above)
Simple suspension rope bridges are overpasses that have no piers or towers and whose deck stoops in a downward arc. Ed Lewis has used the flexibility of a lightweight nylon paracord to replicate the same in a bookshelf.
He chopped a wooden board into several 2” pieces and a couple into 2.5” ones. He drilled a pair of holes into each, and fed paracords through them to connect them all, using three steel washers as spacers. The knots at both ends were singed with a lighter into a gooey mass to make them extra secure. The deck of the shelf was hung to the wall using a pair of shelf holder brackets.
Ed cautions us that, while the bookshelf looks cool, it is also very wobbly: “Grabbing any one book out is sure to make all the others fall on their sides. Pretty much the same with adding one in. I found it to be pretty satisfying after a while, because it was fun to get the balance just right by rearranging with the heavier books in the middle. This work would go out the window whenever anyone wanted to check it out and make it all tumble, but guests always found it fun to put back together again.”
Windproof Lighter
To light a cigarette or a pipe in the strong winds on deck, sailors often use what’s known as a ‘Shepherd’s lighter’. It works in the wind since it doesn’t use conventional fuel and doesn’t ignite a flame. Instead, it sparks an ember on a piece of cotton rope.
They’re great for hikers who need to start a fire in the outdoors. Lighter aficionado Marcus Dunn shows you how to build one. Marcus tells us that all it takes is a, “couple of common copper plumbing parts and some natural fibre rope” to create a rope lighter, and he has illustrated easy-to-follow instructions in his Instructables page.
The only issue that Marcus had was the diameter of the rope he used was smaller than the copper tube that acted as the barrel of the lighter: “Back when sailors used to use these lighters, they would stick a fish hook through the top of the rope and then connect that to the top of the lighter. I didn’t want to take the chance of getting hooked myself, so I went down a different route.” He instead added a thumb screw into the body of the lighter: “If you want to ignite the rope, you just loosen the screw, push the rope up, and then tighten it again.”
Rope Wall
Morgan Satterfield is a designer who runs a decor business. She was roped in by her friend and fellow designer Shelly Leer, who was setting up a new workshop. Shelly needed help with defining areas for various different workspaces: “Functionally, this one big room had to be used for many, many purposes and still be open, accessible, and of course look awesome.”
Morgan’s solution was to build vertical jute ropes division walls, instead of traditional partitions, primarily because the place was a rental: “A plus when using this type of jute rope is the added benefit of bringing in a chunky, graphic, warm texture to an otherwise cold and hard industrial room.” The simple construction process involved custom wooden boxes with holes drilled in them for the ropes, and Morgan has close-up images of the process on her blog.
Trendy Table
Sarah Goldberg is an avid DIYer and blogs her builds and crafts at WhileTheySnooze, where she literally scribbles when her kids are in bed. As a participant in Creating with the Stars show back in 2013 where the theme was upcycling, she turned an old discarded tyre into a trendy table that was good enough to shoot her into the next round.
She used circles cut from plywood to form the table top and the base for the tyre to sit on. She then glued 350 feet of light-coloured sisal rope, along with the darker natural manila rope, to the tyre: “Turn the table over, start around the base, and work your way to the top of the table.” Sarah’s detailed the process in her blog, and offers suggestions on how to avoid the pitfalls she encountered during the build.
