Andy Champ wrote:

On 20/02/2011 21:54, Ronald Raygun wrote:

No. Do not twist. Twisting is what leads to kinking and tangling.

The correct way to coil a cable, rope, or hose, is to imagine that
it were a flat ribbon with the two sides a different colour. Suppose
the ribbon is lying flat on the ground with no twists in it so that
the blue side is on top and the red side underneath.

(For a right handed person hold the end of the cable in your
left hand blue side up. Grasp the cable with your right hand,
holding it blue side up, then bring your right hand towards your
left hand and just place the cable onto what is already there, so
that it stays blue side up during the whole move. The action of
your right hand does not involve any twisting. You just lift a bit
of cable straight up and plonk it down again, as if you were lifting
a chess piece from one square and putting it down on another.

If the cable is stiff, a side effect of this will be that each coil
will end up with a self-cancelling double twist in it, and will most
likely hang in a figure of eight pattern. But that's the idea.

Ronald, as a sailor you should know the difference between a cable and a
hawser.

Naturally.

And of course the hand you use should be the opposite one
depending which way the rope is laid.

Not necessarily. If the method does not add or remove twist (and the
one I described doesn't) then it doesn't matter which hand you use.

When you are coiling twisted rope it's imperative to coil it in such a
way that the twist is not destroyed.

Fair enough, but the other important consideration is that you want the
coiled rope to uncoil freely without snagging. For that, it's important
that the coiling and uncoiling procedures should be mirror images of each
other, in terms of any twists added or subtracted cancelling out.

Imagine trying to coil a rope the other end of which is tied on to a
fixed object (not that you'd normally do this - you'd start at the fixed
end pulling the loose end towards you). If you added a twist with each
loop, then by the time you got near the fixed end, it would all be a
twisted mess, having suffered an accumulation of anti-twists (you can
easily convince yourself of this by imagining a rope tied between two
fixed points, then grabbing it in the middle to apply a twist - then on
one half of the rope the lay will get tighter, on the other it will get
looser).

What would be OK, though, and is the recommended method for coiling
stiff stuff like electric cable or water hose, is to give a positive
twist to the first coil, then a negative twist to the second, and so
on, alternating positive with negative so that the overall effect
along the whole length of rope is neutral.

One of the methods of tidying a rope is to roll it up on a drum (this
is the preferred method for garden hose). Having done this, it is
imperative that the rope, when next needed, should be taken off the
drum the same way, i.e. tangentially, so the drum revolves in the
opposite direction. What you should not do is remove the rope
axially, such as by laying the drum flat on the ground (axis vertical)
and unwrapping the loops up off it. Depending on which side of the drum
is uppermost, the uncoiled rope will have its lay tightened or loosened.
Likewise if you were to wrap rope onto a drum axially, you should
not then unwind it tangentially.

One traditional method of coiling rope is not into the hand but flat
onto the deck (or ground). This is equivalent to wrapping it axially
onto a drum, and leaves each loop neutral while adding and subtracting
a half twist to alternate half-loops. Laid rope is usually flexible
enough to absorb these half-twists without trying to lie in figures of
eight as a stiff cable or hose would want to do.