Brion Toss - The Complete Rigger’s Apprentice: Tools and Techniques for Modern and Traditional Rigging, 2nd Edition

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This book is dedicatedto the memory of Nick Benton, Master Rigger

by Larry Pardey

by Peter H. Spectre

by Des Pawson

30 years ago, with an old cable spool as a chair, and my workbench as a desk, I began to write the first version of this book. I wrote longhand, on a yellow legal tablet, slowly filling page after page with what I hoped and meant would become a primer on sailing vessel rigging. I wrote as much to refine and clarify my own meager understanding of the subject as to inform anyone else; even then I had an inkling of the vast scale of what there was to know about rigging, and how incomplete my own comprehension was. But I was also filled with an evangelical zeal. I wanted the world to know about this beautiful art.

In the years since, I have worked on hundreds (thousands?) of rigs. On some days, I seem to have acquired some level of competence. On other days, the learning curve is unbearably steep. On those days, to paraphrase Clifford Ashley, I feel that if I can just keep improving at this rate, and if my health holds out, I might someday manage to get a grasp of the fundamentals. Therefore, gentle reader, consider this new edition to be a work in progress. It is certainly an improvement on the previous editionalmost every page of my copy is marked with red inkand in addition to corrections and evolutions you will find new ways of thinking about and working with rigging.

Some general bits of advice:

In the course of my career it has been my privilege to work with theater riggers, industrial riggers, arborists, timber framers, circus riggers, mountain climbers, etc., in addition to riggers of all types of sailing vessels. The particulars of each branch of the art vary widely, and not all of the insights in one field are applicable in another, but we all have a lot to learn from one another.

Many of my clients have been engineers or architects, and they have been unfailingly generous and patient in expanding my understanding of the design aspects of the art. Rueful admission: when I was in high school, there was only one class about which I said, Ill never use this crap. That class was trigonometry. It turns out that you cannot be a competent rigger without some understanding of trigonometry.

Whether you get your information from a professional, or someone down the dock, or YouTube, be sure of its validity before you put it into practice. Math can be a big help here, but so can discussion, direct experiment, and common sense. This advice (I pause here to wince) goes for some of the recommendations found in previous editions of this book. The current one as well, for all I know. You can be wrong about things you sincerely believe in. It is overwhelmingly likely that you are wrong about many things, right now. This can have a paralyzing effect, partly because it can be embarrassing, but mostly because, in rigging, peoples lives are at stake; your beliefs translate directly to safety. Or not. Thats why we have civilization, which at its best functions as a non-genetic means of preserving and transmitting aids to survival. Test results, engineering standards, theories, and algorithms are the left-brain means to this end. But dont underestimate the power of story, of anecdote. For instance: some electricians were rewiring a house. Their client, observing their work, saw that they were, um, selectively disregarding certain portions of the electrical code, specifically those sections that the city inspector was unlikely to check. When the client called them on this, the job boss said, Come on, when was the last time you heard about someone being electrocuted by their house? He just didnt understand that every line of that code was written in blood, that the reason that our houses are unlikely to electrocute us is that we have made formal note of things that have killed people, and seek to avoid them, with a further subtext being that the logic behind every line of construction code is not always immediately apparent to the casual observer.

Attend, then, to standards, to tradition. And do your best to work out the reasons behind the standards, to keep them alive, and to make them easier to pass on effectively. Which brings us to:

I have traded in my legal pad for a laptop, but I still want to keep this gift moving. Teaching is a way to express a basic human need: helping to take care of others. Some people teach as a way of showing off, others because they actually cant do anything else, but the best teaching is an