My wife has been complaining about the thin rope for hauling up the washing line hurting her hands when she's hanging out the washing. Also, the line poles are 30yrs old and rusting through and I've had to get rid of the rotary line she used for small stuff when I gave the garden a makeover this year, so I decided to do the whole lot over.
Firstly I needed two new line poles. Not as easy as you'd think to bring a long tube home but fate stepped in when next door's roof lost some of it's flashing. They had a scaffold built then when they came back to strike it I bribed the two scaffs with £15 and eight cans of Kronenbourg to leave behind a pair of newish 15ft tubes.
Now for some rope. Lady luck came shining through again when I got the job pf dismantling a pair of large window cradle suspension units. They included a couple of hundred feet of really nice half inch rope (used for traversing the machine and winching the cradle) and various pulleys so I grabbed an assortment of those and stuffed them in my bag to bring home, much to the amusement of the site staff.
I wanted a way of making it easy for my wife to pull up and secure the line. The old line poles had an iron cleat that you wound the rope round in a figure eight, but that was awkward and meant holding the weight of the washing so I figured if I could make a clamp that she could easily tighten with one hand it would be a lot better. The rope joiner I just machine out of a bit of ally bar. I tapped a m6 hole int he end about 20mm deep, folded the end of the new line over and screwed it into the thread, then clamped it with a couple of m4 grub screws - it ain't coming out. The rope ends are clamped tight with a M8 grub screw. The taped-up ends I left long temporarily in case it stretched and I had to pull some slack out of the rope. After a while I'll cut them back neat.
So here's what I ended up with. I made the rope clamps by drilling and milling the end of a pair of monitor support arms. The clamp bolts are salvaged off a scrapped wood lathe I bought for the motor, the rest I either made or salvaged off the cleaning cradle.
