Storing or Hanging Whips

[Miloh]

I have a buddy who has a couple of leather whips that he rolls up and hangs on his wall by a simple nail. Sort of makes me cringe as I think it would be bad for the whip long term. It seems like where the nail is, there would be a stress point for the whip.

Figure I would ask here... So how do people here hang up/store their pride and joys? Do they display them on their wall with a nail? Or perhaps lay them on a shelf horizontally? I only have a couple and I lay them flat on a shelf, loosely rolled up.

Feel free to include pics!

[raider 57]

Miloh,I don't think hanging is bad so long as the object it's on is not too sharp. A nail is NOT so good! Too much weight concentrated on too small an area and the metal end can be sharp.
I have a wooden peg I use occasionally. Most of the time I just lay my whips flat and loosely coiled. Safe from abrasions.
~raider 57

[maboot38]

I like hanging it by the handle straight down so that the business end of the whip isn't affected.

[Canuck Digger]

A simple solution is to have two points of contact, so that the whip hangs horizontally; coil the whip as you would normally, then have one point of contact under the coil, and another under the handle. Ideally, these points of contacts would be rounded, smooth and wide. Two large wooden dowels spaced about a foot apart is great. You want to stay away from anything sharp, pointy or that can rust. Don't go crazy with this stuff though. The whip isn't going to suddenly disintegrate if you don't. But prolonged pressure on a very small area of contact is probably not the best way to go.

I've hung whips by tying a leather strand around the coiled whip and made a simple shoe-lace type of knot with the strand, and used the two loops of the knot to hand over a nail. The thing is, I wrap the strand at the top of the loop, so the handle hangs vertically, as if it was on Indy's belt hehehe. That's one way to do it. Another, equally as simple, is to use the same length of leather and tie the coiled whip (BTW, when we say coiled, we ALWAYS mean a LOOSE coil. NEVER a tight coil) at the point where it would balance horizontally. Why bother finding these two balance points? It's just so the coil won't slip in time and tighten around the leather strand and become too compressed. Basically it's to avoid any chance of the whip slipping and becoming kinked because nobody noticed it had slipped and become all tangled up.

A good way is to have the wooden pegs mounted on a baseboard, meaning a wood board (NOT plywood because it can have chips and rough surfaces), but a smooth piece of wood, preferably sanded and either oiled or lightly varnished, and what you do is you either screw-in the wood pegs with a single screw that goes through both the peg and the board, or you drill a hole that is the size of the peg (but a tight fit) and you glue in the peg. Do a series of rows or columns, making sure to leave enough space for whips to not touch each-other (if they do it's not the end of the world, but you wouldn't want a freshly greased black whip to be toughing a white one...), and when the entire board is finished, just mount it to whatever wall you want. Even if you only have one whip, a nice decorative wood plaque would show it off nicely, not to mention preserve your whip. You want to use as thick a board as you can, nothing under 3/8" thick, preferably a good 1/2" in thickness. You don,t have to mount them at an angle, so the whips will always slide toward to board, though that is perhaps another neat trick to use, as long as the pegs are long enough, meaning if you're going to go through the trouble of doing all this, don't mount pegs that are only 3/4" long. Go at least 2" long and you won't have to worry about the whip not having any space. If you have lots of whips but are short on space, make your pegs long enough to handle two whips at a time. Just make sure that when you do mount whips next to each-other they are of the same color.

Alternately, and supremely simple, is to simply place the whip on a shelf and make sure direct sunlight doesn't hit it. A simple shelving unit with lots of shelves a few inches apart could store lots of whips this way, and if you want to get all fancy, you could even have each shelf mounted on rollers, like a drawer, and you could even line the bottom of each drawer with felt to further protect the whips, just make sure the felt is like what is used on pool tables and not the furry kind... Actually this idea of a whip drawer unit sounds really nice, but is so costly that there wouldn't be any point unless you really had lots of whips.

Good luck,

Franco

[maboot38]

Whew.

So is that to say that my method of keeping a whip completely straight and vertical is NOT a preferred? I would think that would keep all outside forces on the whip completely equal, including gravity.

[Chewbacca Jones]

What about putting them in a whip bag and hanging the bag on a hook?

[Canuck Digger]

Maboot38: not at all, hanging a whip is perfectly fine, provided you can hang it on all its length.

Leaving them in a whip bag is fine, provided there is no humidity trapped in the leather.

[maboot38]

Thanks for the clarification, Canuck.

I have a stairway in the house that allows whips to be hung completely straight, so I definitely don't have any point at which they bend up. This keeps them straight and unbiased to one side or another.

[Marhala]

I hang my bullwhips from my plaiting hooks. The hooks are placed on the wall, and I use a wide strap of thick leather (about 3"x12" and 12 oz thick). The strap has two holes in both ends and it acts a bit like a whip holster. I simply put the whip's handle in there, sitting horizontally, letting the transition fall down naturally, if it's a bullwhip and the beginning of the thong near the keeper if it's a stockwhip, to let the handle hang vertically. Some other whips I simply let them over a flat surface (I don't have as many plaiting hooks as whips!).

All the best,

Aldo.

[Miloh]

Some really good advice here. Thank you all for the input!

[Solent MKIII]

I hang mine on wood pegs.



I don't have anywhere to store my whips flat, and wall space is at a premium where I live, so I made some pegs that screw into the underside of my shelves.



I cut out the peg support from pine, glued on a section of half-round for the whip to rest on, pre-drilled some holes in the back support for screws, then sanded the whole thing down nice & smooth. You could varnish the wood, or glue felt on top of the half round as well. If I make these again sometime, I might consider going larger on the pegs.