Making Deadeyes and Wooden Blocks Yourself

Collection: Regenerative Materials | Series: Natural Ropes |

Subject: Making deadeyes for the first time — what the old sources specify, what actually happened, and an honest assessment of where they belong on a small boat

Why I made them at all

The deadeye question arrived sideways, the way most useful questions do. I was working through Bushell's Rigger's Guide for the seizings post and found myself reading his deadeye specifications in detail — the diameter tables, the proportions, the instructions for turning dead eyes in lower rigging before the mast is stepped. The precision of it was arresting. Bushell gives the diameter of dead eye required for each size of shroud, the exact geometry of the eye seizing, the lanyard reeving sequence and the specific reason for it. This is a man describing a system he understood completely, for readers who needed to understand it completely, because the standing rigging of a working vessel depended on it.

I had never made a deadeye. I had used the word, read the descriptions, understood the principle. But I had never actually turned one from a piece of wood and fitted it into a shroud, and the gap between understanding a thing in description and understanding it in practice is one I keep encountering in this work. So I made some.

What follows is an account of a first attempt rather than an established practice — the sources I used, where they were useful, where they left gaps, and what I learned that the sources did not contain.

What a deadeye is and what it does

A deadeye is a round, flat disc of dense hardwood with three holes bored through it in a triangular arrangement. Two deadeyes are used together as a purchase system for tensioning standing rigging — one is seized into the shroud or stay eye, the other is fitted to a chainplate or channel fitting on the hull, and a lanyard is rove through the pairs of holes alternately to create a mechanical advantage that allows the shroud to be set up tight and adjusted as the rigging stretches and settles.

The name comes from the appearance — the three holes in a round face look vaguely like two eyes and a mouth, though this is easier to see once someone has told you to look for it. Before that it just looks like a disc with holes.

The mechanical principle is simple: the lanyard rove through three pairs of holes gives a 6:1 purchase that allows considerable tension to be applied with manageable hand effort. Unlike a turnbuckle, which provides equivalent adjustment through a threaded metal fitting, a deadeye and lanyard system is entirely rope and wood. It can be made from available materials, adjusted or replaced at sea without tools, and when it fails — which it will, eventually — it fails gradually through visible deterioration rather than suddenly through metal fatigue.

The grommet strop post covers the rope strop that connects the deadeye to the shroud eye. The deadeye and the strop are a system, and the proportions of one constrain the proportions of the other.

What the sources specify

Bushell gives tables. This is characteristic of his approach and one of the things that makes him genuinely useful rather than merely interesting. The diameter of the deadeye should be once and a half times the circumference of the rope it serves. The thickness of the deadeye — the dimension measured across the flat face — should be sufficient to take the holes without the wood becoming fragile between them. The holes themselves should be large enough to take the lanyard rope, which Bushell specifies as half the circumference of the shroud.

The scoring — the groove cut around the equator of the deadeye that seats the rope strop — should be deep enough to hold the strop securely without allowing it to ride up and over under load, but not so deep that the remaining wood at the bottom of the groove is thin enough to split. Bushell gives the scoring depth as proportional to the rope diameter but does not state the exact ratio explicitly — it is implied by the overall dimension tables, and I had to work it out by inference rather than direct statement.

The wood is not specified by name in Bushell at the points I found most useful, but the traditional materials are elm, ash, and lignum vitae — lignum vitae being the hardest and most durable, elm being the traditional choice for large deadeyes where lignum vitae in the required dimensions was unavailable or too expensive. Lignum vitae is extremely dense, naturally oily, and highly resistant to wear at the lanyard contact points — the holes in a lignum vitae deadeye barely mark under years of use. Elm is softer and requires more attention to the lanyard contact surfaces to prevent wear cutting into the wood.

For a first attempt I used a piece of close-grained ash — available, workable, and strong enough to demonstrate whether the proportions work before committing to harder and more expensive material.

Making them

The process has three stages: turning the disc to diameter and thickness, boring the holes, and cutting the scoring groove. Each is straightforward in principle and requires attention to specific details that the descriptions do not always make obvious.

The disc. A lathe is the ideal tool and not the only tool. Ash can be worked to a circle with a drawknife, a spokeshave, and a rasp — it takes longer and the result has less perfect geometry, but for learning purposes the slight irregularity is not structurally significant. The important dimensions are the diameter, which must be accurate for the strop proportions to work, and the thickness, which must be consistent across the face so that the strop sits evenly.

I turned the first two discs on a lathe, which produced clean results, and made two more by hand to understand the process without machinery. The hand-made discs are functional. They look different — slightly less perfectly round, with hand tool marks visible on the faces. For a working boat that is transported and rigged on the water rather than kept permanently fitted out, that difference is irrelevant.

The holes. Three holes bored in a triangular arrangement, equidistant from the centre and from one another, large enough to take the lanyard without binding but not so large that the lanyard seats poorly. The spacing between holes matters — too close and the wood between them is weak, too far and the lanyard geometry becomes awkward when rove.

Boring by hand with a brace and bit produces clean holes in ash if the bit is sharp and the work is held firmly. The first hole I bored wandered slightly — the bit deflected on a grain line — and the resulting hole is not quite perpendicular to the face. It functions. It is not what I would want in rigging under sustained load, and I would remake it before putting it into service on anything critical. A drill press removes this variable entirely. Marking the hole centres carefully before boring, and starting with a small pilot hole, helps with hand boring.

The scoring groove. Cut around the equator of the disc to a depth that seats the strop rope without allowing it to ride. I used a scratch stock — a simple single-tooth scraping tool made from a piece of steel file ground to shape — worked around the disc circumference with the disc held in a vice. The scratch stock cuts slowly and cleanly, and the depth is easy to control. A router in a simple jig would be faster. The scratch stock is quieter and requires no electricity, which is a consideration when working in a shed without power.

The groove profile matters. A rounded bottom seats a rope strop more evenly than a flat-bottomed groove, because rope is round and distributes its load around a curved contact surface better than a flat one. I cut a rounded profile using a gouge after the scratch stock established the depth and position.

Fitting and what the lanyard reeving teaches you

Bushell's instruction on lanyard reeving is precise in a way that reveals its own reasoning. The standing part of the lanyard is spliced into an eye bolt in the chains — the hull fitting — not into the lower deadeye. The lanyard is then rove from the chains up through the after hole in the lower deadeye, across to the corresponding hole in the upper deadeye, down through the next hole in the lower, across to the next in the upper, and so on until all three pairs of holes are rove.

The reason Bushell gives for the standing part going to the chains rather than the lower deadeye: this is where the first and greatest strain comes when setting up. If the standing part were rove through the deadeye itself, the strain on setting up would come onto the seizing that holds the deadeye in the shroud eye, and would cause the deadeye to slew. By taking the standing part to the chains, the purchase acts against the hull fitting rather than against the rigging seizing, and the deadeye remains properly oriented under tension.

I did not understand this from reading it. I understood it from rove-ing the lanyard incorrectly, setting up the shroud, and watching the upper deadeye rotate out of position. Reading Bushell again after that, the instruction made immediate sense. The sources are often most legible after you have already made the mistake they are trying to prevent.

How well they work

They work well. The purchase is smooth, the adjustment range is generous, and the visual feedback on tension — watching the lanyard geometry as it is hauled taut — is actually more intuitive than the feel of a turnbuckle wrench. You can see what the rigging is doing in a way that a threaded fitting does not show you.

The deadeyes I made are on the small catamaran I am currently building. The shrouds on this boat will be hemp, tarred and served, set up with deadeye and lanyard rather than turnbuckles. The fitting-out process — rove-ing the lanyards, setting up the shrouds, adjusting for the initial stretch that new hemp rope always has — was the first time I had done this on a real rig rather than a practice length of rope, and the system behaved exactly as the sources said it would. Initial stretch required taking up the lanyards after a short period under load. Once they had settled, the tension held.

The honest question about small boats

Here is where I am less certain, and it is worth being direct about it.

Deadeyes make sense on a vessel that lives rigged and in the water — a traditionally fitted gaff cutter, a working smack, a vessel where the standing rigging stays up and the deadeyes are accessible for periodic adjustment and lanyard replacement. On a boat like that, the system is simple, effective, and entirely appropriate.

On a small performance-oriented sailing boat that is transported on a trailer and has its standing rigging removed for transport and re-rigged at the water — which describes most of the small traditional-rigged boats I work with and sail — the picture is more complicated. Re-rigging deadeyes at the waterside requires rove-ing the lanyards fresh each time, or at least checking and re-rove-ing them if they have been removed. The lanyard condition needs to be checked before each use. The adjustment process takes longer than tightening a turnbuckle.

Whether this matters depends on how often the boat is rigged and de-rigged, and how much you value simplicity of gear versus speed of rigging. For a boat rigged and launched once or twice a month, the additional time is negligible. For a boat rigged daily or transported frequently, it starts to add up. I have not found a settled position on this yet, partly because the catamaran I am building is at an early stage and I have not yet experienced a full season of rigging and de-rigging with the deadeye system.

What I am confident about is this: for a vessel that is left rigged for extended periods, deadeyes are genuinely better than turnbuckles in a natural materials system. No metal to corrode at the interface with hemp. No seized threads to free with a wrench after a wet season. Adjustment visible and intuitive. Failure gradual and foreseeable. For a boat that is frequently de-rigged, the question is open and probably depends on the individual boat and how it is used.

The catamaran bridgedeck application

The application where I am most certain about deadeyes — or rather, their close relative the simple lashed deadeye — is the X-bracing lashing on a catamaran bridgedeck structure.

The bridgedeck of a small catamaran needs to resist the racking forces that occur when the two hulls move differently through chop — forces that want to collapse the rectangular frame of the bridgedeck into a parallelogram. X-bracing with rope, tensioned with a simple deadeye and lanyard system at the crossing point, is a clean, light, and entirely removable solution. The lashing can be set up with appropriate tension, adjusted as the ropes settle, and the whole assembly removed for transport in minutes.

For this application the deadeye does not need to meet the full rigour of standing rigging specifications — it is not carrying the mast load, and a failure here is inconvenient rather than catastrophic. The wood choice can be simpler, the proportions can be less precise, and the lanyard can be lighter than a shroud lanyard would require. This is where a first attempt at deadeye-making belongs, and where the learning can accumulate at a cost proportionate to the consequences of getting something wrong.

I have two such lashings on the current catamaran build, made from the ash deadeyes produced during this investigation. They have been tested under static load but not yet under sailing conditions. That test will come in the season ahead.

What I would do differently

The hole boring is where I would focus most attention on a second attempt. Perpendicular holes, bored with a drill press or at least with a carefully set-up guide, produce cleaner lanyard movement and more even load distribution than holes that wander slightly off perpendicular. The difference is not dramatic in light use, but under sustained load the rope wears unevenly against a hole that is not square to the face, and the wear point becomes a stress concentration.

The ash is adequate for the bridgedeck application and adequate for demonstrating the process. For standing rigging I would use lignum vitae or well-seasoned elm, which are both harder and more resistant to the wear at the lanyard contact points. Lignum vitae is available from specialist timber suppliers in small sections — the quantities required for deadeyes on a small boat are modest — and the natural oils in the wood reduce the need for additional treatment at the rope-contact surfaces.

The strop dimensions from the grommets post apply directly to deadeye fitting. Getting those proportions right on the first attempt requires either careful measurement or accepting that the first few attempts are the learning rather than the product. They were the learning. The product came after.

Sources: Charles Bushell, The Rigger's Guide and Seaman's Assistant (Griffin & Co., 1874). Hervey Garrett Smith, The Marlinspike Sailor (International Marine, 1971). H.A. McKenna, J.W.S. Hearle and N. O'Hear, Handbook of Fibre Rope Technology (Woodhead Publishing, 2004).

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