President's Message

By Bill Putnam

Welcome to the winter edition of our Ropecord News. We are all wrapping up our year-end plans and preparing for the New Year of 2024 in our businesses and our personal lives. I hope the year 2023 has been healthy and happy and 2024 brings continued success.

As we plan for 2024, please remember to mark your calendars to include our Winter Virtual Technical Meeting on February 6-7, 2024. We switched to this virtual format by necessity in 2020 and 2021. We had strong participation and good success. With typical winter travel weather always a concern, we have decided to continue this as a virtual event for 2024.

We will all have a chance to network and get together again at our annual meeting on June 16-19 at the Sonesta Resort, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. This is a biennial joint meeting with our Eurocord partners and is always an excellent event. Reservation details and the agenda will be coming out in the new year.

Our organization continues to be strong financially. We are starting our 2023/2024 fiscal year with good participation by members and our income and expenses are in line with budget expectations. This was our first year with a new online dues calculation system and we appreciate all the members that provided feedback and helped work through the new system. 

Our mission includes being the relevant leader in standards development globally. We are seeing growing success in this area and awareness of CI and our technical standards are an area we should all be proud of. The work being done in this regard is often a slow and challenging job as we work through various committees and organizations that are involved in all things related to rope standards. Our Technical Director, Sarah Padilla, will report on current initiatives. 

This is a good time to thank Pete Lance and his team for all the work they do on our behalf to keep the wheels turning. The 2022/2023 work wrapped up on the website upgrades and that allowed us time to set up a regular cadence of LinkedIn posting. Special thanks to the Communications Committee headed by Fran Hoffman and James Wolfington for creating a full schedule set up with a new release every week.

We appreciate all the members that were able to attend the Fall Technical and Board Meeting held on October 3-4, 2023. The Technical Committee had a very active schedule that will be reported later in the newsletter. As always, we thank member companies and attendees for allowing participation in these technical groups as it is the strength of our association. Many committees still need additional members and chairs, and we encourage your participation. 

A big thank you to the Associate Members who sponsored this meeting: 

• Avient Protective Materials
• FibrXL
• Hailide America, Inc
• Honeywell
• I-Coats N.V.
• Kuraray America, Inc.
• Teijin Aramid
• TP Industrial Yarns B.V

Comments or suggestions on any of the initiatives we are undertaking, or should be considering, are always welcome. You can send feedback to Pete Lance or any of the board members. Thank you for your continued support and participation.

I wish you all good health and happiness during this holiday season and into the New Year. Take an extra moment to appreciate your family, friends, and business associates.

The Cordage Institute is pleased to announce the appointment of Stuart Janke from Cortland Industrial to the Board of Directors. Mr. Janke brings over 35 years of global experience in the synthetic rope industry, occupying senior leadership and management roles across various business development and operational roles at Cortland. Mr. Janke has led Cortland through several transformational ownership changes and overseen the implementation of Cortland's innovative manufacturing technologies and branded synthetic rope, tether, and sling products. Having resided in Asia Pacific and Australia and led partnerships in China, India, and Southeast Asia, Mr. Janke brings a diverse geographical business experience to lead Cortland's continued global expansion.

Mr. Janke is excited to join the Board and looks forward to learning from members and working to improve the organization.

The AD400 is specifically engineered to automate the doffing process for tubeless bobbins on the Roblon Tornado 400 twister. This ensures a swift and efficient transition between production cycles, reducing downtime and increasing overall productivity.

The robot removes finished bobbins from the spindle and precisely places them on an external tray. After successfully doffing the finished bobbin, the AD400 will restart the Roblon Tornado 400, ensuring a continuous and uninterrupted production flow and thereby increased productivity.

Designed to seamlessly integrate with existing setups, Defender Fuse accurately accounts for total system energy, making it a versatile solution for a wide range of applications.

Unique in its ability to integrate into any mooring system without the need for line replacement, Defender Fuse considers the full spectrum of system energy, ensuring comprehensive protection in various scenarios.

While conventional snapback technologies focus solely on individual mooring components, Samson engineered Defender Fuse to address the entire mooring system’s energy absorption, including the stiff, high-performance mooring lines and elastic tails prevalent in the industry.

More than 100 days have passed since Tennessee-based private equity firm River Associates Investments LP acquired I&I Sling and Slingmax with an eye to create an industry leader to provide custom synthetic rope and heavy lift sling solutions for the electric utility, offshore energy, construction, arborist and inland, and commercial marine industries.

I&I Sling is a manufacturer of custom lifting slings, a supplier of rigging hardware and hoists and a provider of testing, engineering, repair and inspection services, while Slingmax is a supplier of advanced, high-performance synthetic slings and multi-part wire rope slings through 37 independent companies in 12 countries, each of which are exclusively licensed, trained and certified to manufacture, repair and test Slingmax products.

Netherlands-based FibreMax, a producer of customized mooring tendons, announced a new collaboration with floating wind foundation maker PelaStar, synthetic rope producer Yale Cordage and Avient, manufacturer of Dyneema lightweight, ultra-strong fibers. The goal of the joint venture is to focus on enhancing local content development and driving economic growth in the State of Maine’s floating wind sector.

With the ambition of localizing the supply chain and leveraging the collective expertise, the partners aim to minimize environmental impact, reduce project risks and create economic opportunities within Maine.

Back in 2002 or 2003, my friend Chris “Chez” Chesak won a rope. Psyched! At the time he was working for the American Alpine Club (AAC), but he left and moved from Golden, Colorado, to Boise to be near his eventual wife, Sally. As a member of Idaho Army National Guard, he was deployed to Iraq for a year in 2004. One child was born, and another, and that nice 10.2mm BlueWater Eliminator sat dormant all this time, and through four times moving house.

An artist from the Knox County town of Appleton is creating colorful wall hangings and sculptures, using recycled rope once used as lobster gear.

Eric Darling says his mission is to keep as much rope out of landfills as he can while giving that rope new life in a way people can appreciate.

"I'm doing something that's helping out the environment as well as it's a gorgeous medium to work with," said Darling.

The rope is known as pot warp and Darling says he literally stumbled upon it as an artistic medium.