Ropes.
The tools of our trade that help us bring home the big money, the prizes, and, of course, the bragging rights. When we pick out a rope, we first swing it to make sure it feels just right. If it doesn’t, we go back and pick out another.
At Lone Star, we take our most important piece of roping equipment very seriously. We pride ourselves on the care and dedication we put into making the best product we can for each and every roper. It all starts with our rope shop leader, Guy Alford, our resident expert on the ins and outs of our rope-making process.
“Each rope we make has a different recipe so to say and that’s what we use each time we build that specific rope,” Guy says. “From start to finish the rope has different stages it goes through to make sure it is a working product that you will love.”
The process begins with the raw material that our rope makers have picked out. The next step is to make the string from this raw material. This string is the base of the rope. While making the string, our team chooses which material goes into each string, creating different Lone Star ropes. Guy explains the amount of poly material in the string changes the make-up of the rope. Once the string is made, it is then spun together into what begins to look like a rope.
Lone Star’s rope machine takes the string and spins it nice and tight so there are no flaws. Spinning the string is not an easy task - it takes lots of practice and technique. The rope machine has to be weighted and set in just the right ways or you may not get the base you were looking for. Once the ropes are made, they head on over to the wax department, where they are put onto racks and waxed. When the waxing process is complete, the excess gets knocked off and the next batch gets put into the racks. The ropes that have finished wax are headed off to their next step.
Our rope is now almost complete as it heads into the finishing room. In this step the rope gets the eye knot tied, the burners attached and finally the end knot. It will also get little details such as its tag so you know what rope you are picking up. When you have a finished product, the rope is then coiled up. The way it is coiled depends on certain factors such as the time of year, colder months the ropes will be coiled differently than warmer months.
“Coiling the rope certain ways is important and takes some skill to get it just right,” says Guy. The complete coiled rope gets hung on the rack to be ready to ship out. One thing that Lone Star does is give the rope as much age as possible before it heads out to a retailer or customer. A rope with more age will be better than one that is a little newer. And with that we have reached the end with a finished product.
The rope making process is like making a great dish. If one thing is off then the final product won’t be the same. We want to always bring you the latest and greatest product out there for each roper to make their very best runs. We follow the LSR rope-making recipe to the T, making sure that our ropes help every type of roper to do what they do best.
“We pride ourselves on making a great consistent product that gets to the consumer in a timely manner,” Guy says. "We are always innovating to bring you the next best thing, always working to perfect our process. We don't know another way."
