I recently made up a batch of my patented Jute Butter™, because I had some Rope to treat. Jute Butter™ is a 50/50-ish mix of mineral oil and beeswax that I hit with a blender as it cooled (hint, it looks like cake frosting, and melts in your hand like coconut oil).

I see the question about treating rope come up all the time from budding rope artists, asking why, what, how, etc. So I thought it would be useful to try to share a little knowledge I have assembled over my time with rope practice.

A lot of the kinbakushi in Japan famously say they do nothing with their rope, they just start using it. Osada Steve and Naka Akira are in the list of notable examples whose procedures I’ve revisited recently. Osada Steve is on record as suggesting natural body oils from use will do the trick, but you might consider Vaseline (a mixture of paraffin oil, a.k.a. mineral oil, and paraffin wax).

There are recent pictures on Facebook of Naka Akira burning his rope, so it’s not strictly true that he does “nothing at all,” but there is a reason these guys don’t need to do anything:

The rope they use is machine made, and is processed with JBO (Jute Batching Oil) to make the fibers pliable for manufacturing. JBO is a relative of mineral oil, extracted from the crude oil refinery process using a kerosene-like solvent (hence the smell). So in essence, the rope off the spool is already conditioned with a cost-effective solution discovered by a very large fiber processing industry with a big financial incentive to make good rope cheaply.

So if you are OK with that kerosene smell on your new jute rope, you do not need to do anything else to treat it.

It’s been a few years since I had to treat my jute rope with anything, primarily because I’ve been getting top quality rope from M0co that does not smell of JBO. I always recommend his rope – there is none better.

M0co recently told me a bit about JBO I didn’t know. We went digging for even more information and had some interesting finds…

So the reason I made some Jute Butter™ is that I returned from Japan with a big spool of rope. It was cheap in Tokyo (not counting the plane tickets), and is exactly the same rope Naka Akira uses, but it STINKS. It’s awful stuff and I don’t want to use it as is.

JBO will dissipate over time on its own, or you can boil the rope with detergent to strip it away (then you have to dry it under tension, etc.), but it turns out you can drive it off with heat, in an oven. The smoke point of JBO is around 200F, and the flash point is around 260F (information sheets are available online for various brands of JBO). After cutting the rope to length (7m), I loosely pile the coils in an aluminum foil pan and bake at 200F-210F. The oil will be driven off and I’ve found that 2 hours or so was enough bake time for the rope I have to be mostly cleared. WARNING: it will stink up your kitchen, and there will be smoke. Be prepared to ventilate.

After baking, I pile the now nearly-JBO-free-jute in front of a fan and let it cool before coiling. The baked rope smells like grass, but it is also very dry.

THIS is when you need rope conditioning treatment. You need to replace the oil in the rope to keep the fibers pliable (I wrote about different rope conditioners some years ago). I use mineral oil because it is the closest thing to JBO, it is cheap, it is perfectly safe, and it will not go rotten in any way. I use the wax mixed in to give the oil some body, and help protect the rope from moisture.

The amount of conditioning to use is a very personal thing, and also depends on your rope (I like a loose twist rope that is already soft and pliable). Too much conditioner and the cord becomes soft, heavy, wet, and even sticky feeling. Not enough, and it will feel stiff, dry, and fly-away light. Somewhere between dry and wet is the balance of flow and weight that suits your personal style, and there is no way to tell you the balance without experimentation. I have examined the rope of many artists over the years, and jute usually is on the dry-ish side.

Aside from replacing the oil in dry rope, conditioning is a way to manipulate the quality of rope. A too tight twist can be made more pliable with a wetter conditioning, or a too loose rope can be made a bit stiffer with a dryer processing, but there is a limit to the amount of manipulation that can be done like this.