Club Obi Wan

Hello everyone,
I'm new here so I thought I'd stop by, say hi and introduce myself.

Well the name's Franco and I'm in (snow-covered) Montreal, Canada. I'm an Indy fan for sure, and a whipcracker as well. I'm also a part-time whipmaker, though I'm rather new at this (only a few years now). Some of the nice folks on this forum have already had the (dis)pleasure of my gentle probings on the topic .

I've been browsing this forum for a while and finally decided to sign up and make it all legit .

Anyhow that's about it for now.
Cheers all,

Franco

nice to see you around!

This is a great place for whip makers,

tons and tons of info.

Stay a while! Whipmaking is a disease,
it spreads like wildfire, and when you get away from it for a while....
someone who is into it gets you "sick" again...haha. I'm back from a 1 year
whip making hiatus....Its incredibly enjoyable. stick with it and do it for fun, thats the best advice I can give.

Franco, Welcome to Indygear and Club Obi-Wan. Glad to have you here, I think you'll find this site very helpful and informative. Feel free to join in and i am sure we are all looking forward to seeing some of your work.

Dan

Wecome Franco, and yes we do look forward to seeing pictures of your work.
Jim

You are WELCOME here , I'll waiting the pictures of your whip
Gio

welcome to the jungle.[/list]

Thank you all for the warm welcome. I'm hopeless when it comes to posting stuff on the interweb I'm afraid, how does one go about posting pics here?

Cheers,

Franco

Open a photobucket account...
Upload pics and post using the image tags below the thumbnails in your album.
http://photobucket.com/

Hi everyone, I think I've figured out the posting of pics...

Here's one I made a while back. It's a 10 foot, 12 plait, kangaroo hide bullwhip with the standard inner construction. This is the first whip where I skived opposite corners. The angle wasn't quite right on it, but there it is.
[img][img]http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e337/ ... p-001b.jpg[/img]

Thats a beautiful looking whip. Do you have a website?

Nope. I started making them again after a good 15 years off for my youngest nefew who wanted to play around with one, and then well, it's the same old story isn't it? I got hooked. Started making them to get better, and before I knew it, things were improving and I even sold a few and made some for the movies. But I'm still "finding my own voice" as a whipmaker. Maybe when I'll have gotten to 50 whips I'll put a site up, but that whip was only number 15, so there's room to grow still.

Here's the latest one, but in this (very bad) pic, it hadn't been rolled or shellacked yet so... Anyway, it's an 8 foot, 12 plait roo hide bull, with the standard "Indy" inner construction. I'm very happy how the skiving turned out this time around )
[img][img]http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e337/ ... whip2b.jpg[/img][/img]

From what I can see, your work looks great! I'd really be interested in seeing more, larger images!

Thank you very much )

I didn't want to post pics that were too big so as not to overcrowd this site. As soon as I get a chance to have decent close-ups done I'll put those up.

Thanks again for the kind words, and that praise really also belongs to folks like Bernie, Bernardo, Pagey, Joe Strain, Paul Noland, Louie, Mike Murphy and of course David Morgan. I'm sure I'm being an ### and forgetting someone, and to this person I appologize, it doesn't diminish your help in any way; it's merely a reflection of my poor memory )

A lot of people have been generous with their knowledge and have been very nice in wanting to help me in my quest for knowledge. It's very hard to progress without having an accomplished whipmaker there to help, but with the internet facilitating communications and contact between people, some progress can be attained.
Cheers,

Franco

Glad I could help out a bit.

xoxo

Louie
http://www.bullwhips.org

Looks good from here Franco, that top whip especially just screams Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Dan

Hello Franco very nice whips, my compliments
Gio

Buona sera Giovanni, piacere! Come stai?

Grazie per il complimento!
Ciao,

Franco

noooooooooo sei italiano o parli anche l'italiano???
(wow... are you italian or you speck italian???? )

My father is Calabrese... I've lost a lot of my Italian over the years however. In return, I've picked up bits and pieces of Spanish, Portuguese, Roumanian, German, Russian, Ukranian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and I think Australian qualitfies as a language all its own... also my mother tongue is French so... Yeah, Got a bit of an ear for languages hehehe.