Wigan Album

4. A small section of the winding rope from No.3 shaft winding drum.

Once a year during a maintenance shutdown, the winding rope would be “capped” by the blacksmith. This procedure saw the cage held at the top of the pit shaft on a temporary bridging girder stretched across the shaft walls, so that the weight of the cage was off the rope, and a six foot length removed and then sent for testing at Walkden. This piece is just a small section of the portion that would have been removed. I understand from what has been said that every two years the whole rope would be changed as a matter of course with the twelve month check mentioned above, done as an interim precaution. When the rope was to be replaced by a new one and due to the colossal amount of work necessary it would “be all day of a job”. During the days of steam winding, due to the laborious work required to wind the new replacement rope onto the winding drum slowly, literally “inching it round” very gradually so that it lined up with scrolled helix cut into the face of the drum; it was standard practice to have two winders on duty during this procedure; so physically debilitating (or “knackering” of course in pitman’s parlance) was it!
No.3 shaft was around half a mile deep – 2600 feet – so one can imagine the sheer physical graft involved in removing the old rope a landing the new rope!

Approximately one and a half inches in diameter, and made of high tensile steel, it is a multi stranded wire rope. The rope is actually made up of around 9 layers of wire each one wrapped around the preceding lay, the overall circumference of the rope becoming successively larger as each lay is added to it. Each single strand is around 1/8th on an inch in diameter.
This method of construction forms a very strong, yet flexible rope.