About three years ago I ordered 150 feet of New England Fly from New Tribe. Sophia sent me a nice note and said she'd added about 8 to 10 feet more to the order (probably to finish off a 600-foot spool) at no extra charge. Darn nice of her.

I measured in on arrival, which I always do with a new rope, and came up with a slack length of 152 feet and a couple of inches; nothing unusual here since it was probably cut at New Tribe while under tension. Fly has a typical elongation of about 2 to 2.5 percent anyway.

I measured in again last summer with Swamp Fox's super-long tape measure and it was just slightly over 150 feet, slack length. Again, nothing unusual since it'd been washed a few times and even a polyester/nylon blend will shrink a tiny bit.

A few weeks ago I cut one foot off each end to milk the rope, since the core felt like it was bunching up a little. Based on the previous summer's measurement, I should now have a 148-foot rope, slack length. BUT, when I measured it twice today, I came up with identical slack-length measurements of only 140 feet.

Where in the %#(* did my other eight feet of rope go...?

Am I crazy or should I check out all my recent climbing buddies to see if one of them now has an 8-foot lanyard made of Fly rope...?

Mr Bill, You have a serious case of "shrinkage"

I would check your climbing partners gear for a new Fly-made lanyard!

When I ordered my last BLAZE rope from Nick I measured it on delivery and noticed that it was like 147 something but I assumed that Nick had used a few feet to make a tie-eye splice on one end so I did not complained.

I have not measured the roep again but I think I would get a different result now depending on the weather conditions and amount of tension on the rope while measuring it.

Bill, most men don't mention anything about a "shrinkage" problem, that is information we could have done without ol' friend.

guilty

Do they tension it when they put it on the 600ft spools?

Having worked with a lot of spools from most companies I would say that the rope are not under tension or stretched for spooling. Perhaps Bill is just having a senior moment. Or maybe his brother needed a split tail?

Me thinks perhaps the later. Sorry Joe.

Ropes will shrink over time - many rock climbing ropes are cut long to compensate for shrink over time.

Also, ropes will shrink when they dry out after being wet. Some will shrink up to 10% after repeated wetting, but most are about half that.

I just took a good long look at this rope when I met up with Bill and Joe at fine southern wetland for a climb yesterday.

This rope is noticably fat. It has got to be way thicker than when he got it, and it is definitely way fatter than the piece of Fly that I own.

Fly is diferent than most of the other hybrids out there. It's got about eleven laid cords inside of the sheath. It seems like his rope has acted like a chinese finger trap in that it has not only gotten shorter, it has also gotten thicker.

When you grab a little bight and pinch the loop tight between your fingers it seems way less pliable than the new Fly that I have. It seems to have gotten stiffer too.

I kinda noticed that the rope looked fat a while back.

This has me very curious to know if any body is having these type of problems with other ropes.

Sounds like that batch of rope has a problem on the manufacturing process and it is getting worse with time/usage. I hope Nick sees this post and replies. He is very knowledge about this ropes stuff and he may consider sending it back to the company to study what is going on. They usually like to find out these problems to try to resolve them in future ropes.
Hey Bill may even get a free New Rope in exchange. !

Nick is busy baking cakes from what I have seen of his postings at Facebook.
I will send him an SOS on Facebook to call his attencion.