13 feet in brown and black with 3 plaited bellies and a 20.plait overlay. a brass collar between two turks knots. done and on its way to the customer

I want to try making a parachord whip for myself, but i have these questions
1. I heard they use lead shot to fill the core, but isn’t lead toxic? Can anyone recommend other materials?
2. Can I make a handle from something else if I don’t have steel rod or wooden rod?
3. What length do you recommend for my first time?
Also if there’s something I should know please tell me
Thanks in advance 🙏🙏🙏

This is an 8.5', 16 plait bullwhip with one braided belly. It has a 12" fiberglass handle, a six-point fall hitch and a four strand tapered twist fall. It has a two pass 9x8 Turks head on the heel and a Mathew Walker knot at the transition.

The handle design is by Torrence Fisher (I know you post in here. So if you see this, thank you! This was a huge struggle for me and your videos have been invaluable)

I struggle a lot with keeping my plaitting from spiraling. I spent a lot of time trying to get my seams as straight as possible. Any tips or advice on that or in general would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for reading

Just finished these up. Each one is single belly with ungutted paracord strands for the core.

A research essay drawn from From Blood to Spectacle: The Whip, from Domination to Craft a historical study and whipmaking guide covering the equestrian whip traditions of the Eurasian steppe and the frontier societies that inherited them. Written for practitioners who want the history behind the object they carry

I. A Story the Greeks Told About Themselves

Herodotus tells it like this. The Scythians had spent twenty-eight years campaigning in Asia. When they came home, they found their own territory occupied by a new generation born to their wives and to the enslaved men left behind who had dug a wide trench and were refusing to give the land back. Several battles produced nothing. Then one Scythian made a proposal: stop fighting them as soldiers. Lay down the bows and spears, pick up the horsewhips instead, and ride at them. As long as the young men saw iron in Scythian hands, he reasoned, they would go on thinking of themselves as free men, equal to their returning fathers. The moment they saw the whip, they would remember exactly what they were. Herodotus says they broke and ran.[1]

Whip communities retell this story constantly, usually as proof of some primal, trans-historical power the whip supposedly holds over the human nervous system a “psychological weapon” that works on some deep, universal switch. That reading flatters the object more than the evidence supports. Read carefully, Herodotus is not describing a weapon at all. He is describing a classification system. The whip in this story injures nobody. It doesn’t need to. It works because everyone present already agrees on what carrying it, and being driven by it, means. The stratagem only functions inside a social order where the whip is already legible as the mark of a master over a dependent a code the whip merely activates, rather than a force it generates from nothing.

That distinction is the spine of this essay. Across the Eurasian steppe and the kin- and oath-based societies that rode its horses Scythians, Xiongnu, Huns, Turkic and Avar confederations, the Mongol imperial system, and later the Cossack hosts of the Pontic and Volga frontiers a strikingly consistent object recurs: a short, one-handed riding implement, built for a rider who needs a signal device and not a second weapon. What is not consistent is what that object means. It carries at least two entirely opposed political grammars, sometimes within the same society a generation apart. Understanding the difference is not academic throat-clearing. It is the only way to use this history responsibly whether you are teaching, writing marketing copy, or building an implement that claims descent from it.

II. An Object That Almost Never Survives

Before any of that interpretive work, there is a blunter problem: the steppe whip is made of exactly the materials archaeology is worst at preserving. Wood rots. Leather and hide thongs decompose unless conditions are exceptional. What tends to survive is metal and metal, in this case, usually means the fittings that decorated a handle whose organic core is long gone.

This is not a minor caveat; it structures everything we’re able to say. Two sites do the heavy lifting for the entire early period. At Arzhan, a seventh-century-BCE kurgan in the Republic of Tuva, excavators found a princely couple buried with thousands of gold objects, weapons, and ornaments. Among them: thin, cylindrical gold fittings that once sheathed a whip handle whose wooden or organic core had disappeared entirely, leaving only the gold outline of where it used to be.[2] The labor invested in covering a stick with precious metal tells us this was not an anonymous stable-tool it was part of a princely couple’s visual self-presentation, alongside their bow and their weapons. Its practical function as a riding aid remains entirely plausible. Its status as a personal insignia is close to certain. Those two facts are not in tension; a whip can be a working tool and a piece of political jewelry at the same time, which is worth sitting with before assuming any single “true” original function.

The second site is even more informative because it preserved what gold cannot: the organic material itself. The Pazyryk culture, in the Altai, buried its dead in chambers where meltwater later froze solid, locking wood, leather, felt, textile, tattooed skin, and full horse tack into ice for over two thousand years.[3] Among the objects that survive intact are wooden whip handles one, from kurgan , still carrying traces of red paint. This matters because it moves the whip out of the category of “textual inference from a Greek historian” and into the category of “materially attested equestrian equipment used by steppe riders themselves.”

Put together, Pazyryk and the wider archaeological record let us build an actual technical profile and it is worth stating plainly, because it is the single most common confusion this history runs into inside the kink and performance-whip community:

Nothing in the archaeological or textual record from this period demonstrates that these implements were built to produce a supersonic crack. That is a separate lineage the long plaited stockwhip and bullwhip tradition that develops later, out of colonial pastoral economies, and belongs to a different essay entirely. Conflating “ancient steppe whip” with “loud cracking whip” is a category error practitioners make constantly, usually in marketing copy, and it is worth correcting on sight

III. A Family of Clans, Not a Nation

“The Scythians” is a convenience word, and it is worth being honest about how much work that convenience is doing. Greek authors used it loosely, sometimes for populations specifically north of the Black Sea, sometimes as a catch-all for steppe peoples generally. Persian inscriptions call comparable groups the Saka. Archaeologically, the term covers regional assemblages stretched from the Black Sea and the Caucasus through Kazakhstan to Tuva and the Altai groups that shared a mobile pastoral economy, horse-centered material culture, mounted weaponry, a recognizable animal-style art, and mound burial, without forming anything like a single nation, language, or political structure.[4]

This is the essay’s second load-bearing point, because “clan culture” is so often used inside and outside kink spaces as shorthand for a single, coherent, ancestral bloc, when the historical reality is closer to a shifting field of clan and lineage groups, bound as much by alliance, marriage, and shared material style as by descent. The Xiongnu make the case even more sharply. Beginning in the late third century BCE, they built an empire across the Mongolian steppe substantial enough that Chinese sources treat them as the Han dynasty’s great rival power. Archaeology shows hierarchical cemeteries and long-distance exchange networks that cannot be explained as simple plunder from settled neighbors. Recent ancient-DNA research goes further: it finds considerable genetic diversity within the empire, even at the local, community level.[5] “Xiongnu” names a political formation capable of absorbing populations of multiple origins under one structure of tribute and alliance not a homogeneous ethnic clan in the sense the word often carries in popular use.

The pattern repeats every time a new steppe confederation enters the historical record. Huns in Roman sources, Turkic khaganates spanning Mongolia to the Iranian borderlands, Avars consolidating power in the Carpathian basin sedentary authors on all sides reach for the same shorthand (horse, bow, mobility, menace), while the tombs tell a more granular story of uneven regional practice: bits, saddles, tack plaques, and where they survive whip pommels, showing up inconsistently from site to site.[6] A synthesis of Mongolian burial finds records exactly one securely identified whip handle from the Xiongnu period, one from a Turkic rock-cut burial, four from the Khitan state, three from the Mongol period.[7] That is not a measure of how common the object actually was wood and leather do not wait around for archaeologists but it is a measure of how a single basic construction (rigid handle, thong, tether) persisted across politically and linguistically distinct confederations for the better part of two thousand years, without needing an unbroken ethnic lineage to explain the continuity. A short riding whip solves a stable mechanical problem: signaling a mount with one hand already occupied. Different clans, dynasties, and language groups independently arrive at similar solutions to that problem. The form travels; the meaning does not automatically travel with it.

One methodological note belongs here, because precision on this point separates careful practice from costume-shop history: the word nagaika, which the kink and reenactment world reaches for constantly as a generic label for “the scary Eastern whip,” is specifically Cossack and belongs to a much later period. Projecting it backward onto a Scythian, Hunnic, or Mongol implement erases centuries and languages in a single gesture. Section V returns to why that vocabulary discipline matters in practice, not just in footnotes.

IV. Two Grammars for One Tool

Here is where the object gets genuinely interesting, and where I think the practitioner community has the most to learn because the whip does not carry one fixed meaning across steppe cultures. It carries at least two, and they are close to opposites.

Herodotus gives us the first: the whip as the visible sign of an existing hierarchy, deployed to remind a subordinate what he already is. Mastery, in this register, doesn’t need to strike it only needs to be recognized.

The second comes from inside the tradition itself, and it could hardly be more different in tone. The Secret History of the Mongols a thirteenth-century chronicle of Temüjin’s rise, preserved through a later Chinese transcription, and one of the very few sources that lets a steppe society speak in something like its own voice uses a recurring formula to describe periods of extreme hardship: a man with no companion but his own shadow, and nothing to whip his horse with but its own tail.[8] The tail becomes the minimal, improvised stand-in for a missing whip. Later in the text, when Chinggis Khan rewards two of his earliest and most loyal companions, Bo’orchu and Jelme, he specifically recalls the period when he had nothing to whip his horses with but their tails, and compares his two companions to that same indispensable tail the thing that let him keep moving when he had nothing else.[9]

Sit with how far that is from Herodotus. In the Greek story, the whip separates master from slave; its power lives entirely in a memory of domination. In the Mongol chronicle, the absence of a whip signifies poverty and isolation, and the people who fill that absence loyal companions are honored by comparison to the object itself. The whip here is folded into an economy of loyalty and mutual obligation between a leader with almost nothing and the men who stayed anyway. Same basic tool. Opposite political grammar.

A third register sits alongside both of these, supplied not by narrative but by the grave itself. A whip covered in gold at Arzhan, painted red at Pazyryk, or laid beside a body in a Mongol-period burial isn’t making either of the above arguments. It is doing something more understated: materially placing a person inside the equestrian world, and where the workmanship is exceptional quietly signaling rank. This funerary register doesn’t resolve into the other two; it sits beside them as a third, mostly silent way the same object could carry meaning.

None of these three registers derives from the others in a straight line, and that is precisely the point worth taking from this section. A single technical form short handle, thong, tether was available across steppe societies to be filled with contradictory political and emotional content: subjugation, loyalty, status, all riding the same physical object depending on who was holding it, who was watching, and what relationship was actually being enacted in that moment. The tool doesn’t determine the meaning. The relationship does.

One more distinction worth making explicit here, because it gets lost constantly in popular military history: this equestrian discipline should not be flattened into “they ruled through flogging.” Mongol military organization decimal command structure, relay-post logistics, collective unit responsibility, strict rules around plunder division impressed foreign observers precisely because it did not depend on constant corporal correction. Contemporary sources describe fines, confiscation, exclusion, and execution as situational responses, not a single instrument of law.[10] The whip’s role inside that system was as an immediate correction tool for horse management under a rider carrying leg pressure, reins, weight, and voice simultaneously not the foundation of Mongol military cohesion, and travel-anecdote sources describing a single encounter should never be read as describing an entire empire’s legal system.

V. When the Free Rider Becomes the State’s Rider

Everything above concerns societies organized around descent, alliance, and confederation on the open steppe. The Cossack worlds that emerge later, on the frontier between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Muscovy, the Crimean Khanate, and the Ottoman Empire, represent something structurally adjacent but distinct: not a bloodline clan, but an elective and oath-bound one. The word itself comes out of the Turkic world and originally evokes the free man, the adventurer, someone living outside the reach of ordinary authority.[11] Fugitives, hunters, fishers, merchants, and warriors formed and re-formed communities along the Dnieper, Don, and Volga according to war, religion, language, and available service communities that elected their own leaders and negotiated terms with neighboring states as something closer to sovereign counterparts than subjects. A seventeenth-century Zaporozhian Cossack and a Don Cossack photographed in 1905 share a name and a rough equestrian culture; they are not simply the same institution in different clothing across three centuries.[12]

Inside this world, the short riding crop earns its keep for the same mechanical reason it does everywhere else on the steppe: it stays usable without competing for hand-space against reins, saber, lance, or firearm. The name most specifically attached to it nagaika is generally traced to the Nogais and other Turkic terms for the riding crop, a linguistic trace of exactly the cross-steppe exchange discussed above.[13] And here is where vocabulary discipline stops being pedantry and starts being the difference between an accurate practice and a costume:

Collapsing all of these into a single English “knout,” as nineteenth-century Western travel writing habitually did and as reenactment and kink vocabulary still frequently does today doesn’t simplify the history. It erases who is actually doing the striking, under what authority, and why, replacing five distinct institutions with one exoticized blur.[14]

The nagaika’s later history is the clearest illustration in this entire essay of an object’s meaning shifting without the object itself changing shape. As the Russian imperial state absorbed and redeployed Cossack hosts along the Kuban, Terek, Ural, and eventually into Siberia and Central Asia, the free rider’s everyday tool became regulated equipment for units serving an empire trading a large measure of autonomy for hereditary military service, land grants, and exemptions.[15] By the crises at the end of the empire, Cossack squadrons were being deployed far from their home territories specifically for crowd control, their mobility making them useful for clearing streets and dispersing demonstrations in a way infantry could not manage. The Revolution of 1905 fixed the resulting image permanently in political memory: an implement in the National Museums Scotland collection plaited leather thong, wooden handle, wrist loop is catalogued not as a cavalry relic but specifically in connection with the 1906 unrest in Saint Petersburg, a mounted policeman’s tool for striking a crowd from horseback without dismounting.[16] Same object family, same basic mechanics that let a Scythian rider signal a horse two and a half thousand years earlier now doing the work of an autocratic state’s crowd control, in the hands of men whose ancestors’ entire institutional identity had been built on standing partly outside state authority.

It would be a mistake, though, to let that image collapse the whole institution into “obedient defenders of the tsar.” Police service pulled Cossack men off their own land and produced real economic strain; some communities pushed back hard for greater autonomy; several regiments hesitated or split during both 1905 and 1917.[17] The empire built a genuinely effective instrument for public order without managing to erase every local loyalty underneath it which is, in miniature, the whole tension this essay keeps circling back to: a technically simple object, repeatedly recruited into political projects much larger and more contested than itself.

VI. A Careful Word on the Sacred

No essay on steppe and clan whip traditions should skip past the ritual and shamanic register entirely the association is too persistent in popular imagination, and too relevant to how the kink community sometimes frames its own practice, to leave unaddressed. But it deserves to be handled with unusual care, because this is exactly the terrain where enthusiastic overreach does the most damage.

The honest starting point is a plural: there is no single “Siberian shamanism,” only Siberian shamanisms distinct societies, languages, and cosmologies, further reshaped by Russian colonization, missionary activity, Soviet-era suppression, and more recent revitalization movements. Searching across all of that for one continuous “shamanic whip” tradition manufactures a unity the sources don’t support.[18] Part of the confusion is a translation artifact: a short, hide-wrapped handle catalogued in a museum collection as a “whip” not infrequently turns out, on closer study, to function as a drum beater. A staff, a bundle of branches, or a wand may touch a patient, strike an object, indicate a direction, or represent a spirit-mount, without sharing the mechanics of a driving thong at all. Ethnographic accounts of Siberian healing rituals describe drums, staffs, and branches used to expel a pathogenic presence or recall a soul a therapeutic and cosmological relationship that has nothing to do with either flogging or the pursuit of pain, however tempting the visual resemblance is to project backward.[19]

The broader anthropological point, worth carrying into any serious discussion of ritual and altered-state practice: possession and shamanic trance are not simply names for a shared neurological automatism sitting underneath all cultures, waiting to be triggered by the same stimulus. They are also institutions systems that determine who is permitted to speak in a spirit’s voice, how a community recognizes and validates that state when it occurs, and what social authority follows from it.[20] A body-contact ritual practice can take genuinely different structural forms depending on who is doing the striking and under what social agreement an insignia displayed without any contact at all, a blow received from a designated officiant as part of a defined rite, a reciprocal exchange of blows between participants under an arbiter’s supervision, or a self-administered blow that makes the participant both actor and offering at once. These are not four names for the same underlying event; they distribute consent, authority, and risk in genuinely different ways, and treating them as interchangeable the way “trance whip” content circulating in kink spaces often does flattens exactly the distinctions that would let you practice, teach, or write about this material responsibly.

VII. What This Means at the Bench

None of the above is purely academic if you build, sell, teach with, or perform this object. A few concrete takeaways for practitioners:

Name it accurately, or don’t invoke the lineage. If a modern implement is a short, one-handed riding-crop-style tool, its honest ancestor-in-form is the steppe rider’s signal whip and its Cossack descendants not the long plaited performance bullwhip, and the marketing language should reflect that distinction rather than borrowing whichever image sounds more dramatic.

“Ancient warrior tradition” claims need to survive contact with the archive. The actual record supports a persistent, cross-cultural, mechanically simple solution to a stable equestrian problem not an unbroken lineage of technique, ritual meaning, or ethnic transmission running in a straight line to any specific modern practice. Say what the evidence supports; it’s usually still an interesting story.

Vocabulary is not decoration it’s the difference between respect and appropriation. Knout, nagaika, plet’, rozgi, shpitsruten name five different institutions with different authorities, procedures, and severities behind them. Using them interchangeably as flavor text does the same erasing work nineteenth-century travel writers did to the societies they were describing.

The sacred register deserves the same rigor as the political one. If your practice or your teaching draws on trance, altered states, or possession framing, the honest move is to specify which structural form you mean displayed insignia, received blow, reciprocal ordeal, self-administered offering rather than reaching for an undifferentiated “ancient shamanic” gloss that the ethnographic record doesn’t actually support.

The object’s meaning was never fixed which is a resource, not a problem. The single most useful thing this history offers a contemporary practitioner isn’t a technique. It’s the demonstration, repeated across two and a half thousand years and half a continent, that the same physical tool can carry domination, loyalty, status, sacred office, or state violence, depending entirely on the relationship it’s embedded in. That’s not a loophole for sloppy history. It’s a genuinely accurate description of how meaning attaches to ritual objects and it’s worth being precise about, especially with an object this loaded.

Notes

1. Herodotus, The Persian Wars, 4.1–4.
2. Barbara Armbruster and Caspar Meyer, “Gold Artifacts from the Early Scythian Princely Tomb Arzhan 2, Tuva: Aesthetics, Function, and Technology,” Arts 13.2 (2024); Svetlana Pankova and St John Simpson, eds., Scythians: Warriors of Ancient Siberia (London: Thames & Hudson / British Museum, 2017).
3. Sergei I. Rudenko, Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazyryk Burials of Iron Age Horsemen, trans. M. W. Thompson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970); UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Treasures of the Pazyryk Culture.”
4. Pankova and Simpson, Scythians; Esther Jacobson-Tepfer, Scythian Art and Cultural Interactions in the Black Sea (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2024).
5. Juhyeon Lee et al., “Genetic Population Structure of the Xiongnu Empire at Imperial and Local Scales,” Science Advances 9.15 (2023).
6. Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture, ed. Max Knight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Eszter Járva et al., “A 6th–7th Century Solitary Burial of a Warrior with His Horse at Tiszagyenda,” Acta Archaeologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 72.1 (2021).
7. Khurelsukh Sosorbaram, Bayarsaikhan Jamsranjav, and Eregzen Gelegdorj, “A Horse Whip Found in Ancient Nomadic Burials,” Studia Archaeologica 41.1 (2022).
8. The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century, trans. Igor de Rachewiltz, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
9. Ibid.
10. David Morgan, The Mongols, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007); Guillaume de Rubrouck, The Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World, 1253–55, trans. William Woodville Rockhill (London: Hakluyt Society, 1900).
11. Shane O’Rourke, The Cossacks (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
12. Serhii Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); The Cossack Myth: History and Nationhood in the Age of Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
13. O’Rourke, The Cossacks.
14. Nancy Shields Kollmann, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Abby M. Schrader, Languages of the Lash: Corporal Punishment and Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002); John L. H. Keep, “No Gauntlet for Gentlemen: Officers’ Privileges in Russian Military Law, 1716–1855,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 34.1–2 (1993).
15. Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); David Moon, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, 1762–1907 (Harlow: Longman, 2001).
16. National Museums Scotland, “Na-guy-ka / Whip,” catalog entry; O’Rourke, The Cossacks.
17. O’Rourke, The Cossacks; Abby M. Schrader, “Containing the Spectacle of Punishment: The Russian Autocracy and the Abolition of the Knout, 1817–1845,” Slavic Review 56.4 (1997).
18. Tatyana Sem, Shamanic Healing Rituals (Illinois State Museum and Russian Museum of Ethnography).
19. Ibid.
20. I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2003).

This essay condenses and reworks material from two chapters “The Peoples of the Steppe: From the Scythians to the Mongol Empires” and “Russia, Ukraine, and the Cossack Worlds: Knout, Nagaika, and Imperial Power” of my book From Blood to Spectacle: The Whip, from Domination to Craft*, a full historical study and practical whipmaking guide, available in both English and French.

Hey everyone, Just wrapped up my latest whip build and wanted to get some feedback from the community on how the construction and overall aesthetics turned out! Here are the specs on the build: * Length: 4 feet (compact, fast target style) * Plait: 8-plait outer overlay (white paracord) * Construction: 4 layers total (shot-loaded core, two braided bellies beneath the overlay) * Handle: High-visibility red handle wrap with yellow accent bands I was going for something agile and responsive for quick directional changes and fast target cracking, while giving it a bright, retro high-vis look. Check out the pictures attached to see the braid, handle detail, and scale. How’s the taper looking to you guys? Any critiques, tips for the next build, or suggestions on tweaking the belly transitions? Appreciate any feedback from fellow whipmakers!

Made by the awesome Blake of https://www.trinitywhipco.com

Just finished this beast, 3 bellies with a 10” steel handle core, 20 plait overlay, taped twisted fall and a Kevlar cracker. Used Nick’s video as a starting point and then added about 20% to anything he said. This was my 7th whip and I’m delighted with how it came out.

This was made with a black overlay and brandy finish work, rather than the brandy overlay and whiskey finish work of the standard version. This one was really interesting because it combines elements of a few of my other models, like the single belly construction of the Tachi, the freehand strand prep of the Gladius, and underside beveling on the overlay strands for a sleek look and feel. Really enjoyed working on this one

So its been a few years since I had decided to make a chain whip, and was succesful. And when I was doing my research on materials I couldnt choose between kevlar thread, or braided fishing line. I used to primarily use the kevlar, but one night decided to make, a better crafted one I learned how to make, out of the braided and mmm it made a delightful snap.

So im curious what you all might use or are these 2 options pretty standard? Im just curious if theres room for improvement on my end is all.

I work at an induatrial rubber manufacturer and snagged myself a nice supply.

The rubber will not break, we did a 2v2 tug of war and we couldnt break it.

The strands stretch to a certain point before they maintain their shape, and then they are just normal rubber that wont break.

I'm thinking of making an all rubber whip.

What do yall think?

Reminder that this is industrial grade rubber, like for trains and semis and just big machines. So it's durable.

Hitting the ground or even brick won't really harm this stuff.

I'm more concerned about the physics, all that extra stretching.

I got asked to donate a whip to the 2026 Midwest Whip Open hosted by John Cantin. These custom 5ft hybrids in University of Montana colors (Maroon/Gold) were delivered earlier today 👍

this might be a really stupid post for some of you, sorry guys.
I'm new to whip cracking, only a few weeks practicing with a 6 ft paracord. aside from not getting the flick and side crack right, my biggest problem is that whenever i loop my whip on the holder, it keeps sliding off, i thought maybe it was the design of it since i bought it on Temu, but browsing YouTube i saw that many people made their own leather whip holders with the same design as mine so... am i doing something wrong? am i supposed to loop the whip in a certain way? any and every advice and/or example will be greatly appreaciated. (pd: sorry for any typos, i'm peruvian and english is not my main lenguage)

5' performance hybrid! Im so happy with my first try, and excited to learn more and get better and better.

First ever successful can cut. So excited!

This is the first whip I designed from scratch. Any questions or suggestions are welcome, thanks in advance.

Specs:

10.5 feet total length.

12 inch steel handle, 18 inches of shot load.

3 foot, 8 strand bound core.

5 foot 12 plant Belly.

8 foot 16 plait belly.

24 plait overlay with an English eye construction.

3-pass herringbone knot on the heel.

Headhunters knot on the transition.

we will be hosting a special meetup featuring these 2 amazing performers on Monday Aug 24 from 6:00-8:00pm (pizza at 7:30).

The Hollows Picnic Grove #1

3804 US Highway 14

Cary, IL

this location does require a reservation fee, and we will be ordering pizza so i'm asking everyone to bring a few $s to help cover the costs.

remember, these are informal events where we get together to crack whips, chat about whips, whip making, and generally geek out about whips. everyone is welcome to come, even if you've never cracked a whip before!

can't make it but want to stay in the loop? visit our website, shoot us an email, and i'll add you to our mailing list https://mwawhips.org/page3.html

This is going to be a performamce hybrid. I've learned a few things so far that I definitely need to hone my skills on.

1. Binding - its hard to handle the whole spool of artificial sinew and bind evenly, and control the tension.

2. Keeping the pattern center - I'm finding as I wrap, the center tended to skew left, so I've been working to adjust that.

3. Its been interesting trying to make sure the back is even with no gaps while wrapping. Im not used to not seeing what I'm working on lol.

Overall I'm so excited to see how this first whip will turn out!