Here I am out in the snow again, cracking a chainmail bullwhip made by Michael Deveny, alchemaille@yahoo.com. The whip I have is 60 inches long, plus the fall and cracker and cost $350. Michael also makes 40″ and 80″ chainmail bullwhips. He welds together all the links in the last half of the whip so that links don’t fly off, though that’s still a danger if enough of the welds break.
Here’s a quick video where I give some tips on doing a crack called the flick. I’m using an 8 ft David Morgan bullwhip. www.winrichwhips.com
The Singleton Special: this is a whip crack created by Andrew Thomas of Australia and is named after Singleton, the town where Andrew is from. If you like the video, leave a rating of 5 stars! If you have any questions, leave a comment or send a message.
If you’ve managed to learn all the basic cracks, use some of the patterns shown here as inpiration to learn more. I’d say all these patterns can be learned by experimentation, trial and error. So if you see one you like and you don’t get it right away, keep working at it. I also recommend getting a 6 ft stock whip to learn these patterns. They can be learned with a bullwhip, but they can be learned faster with a stockwhip. Check out www.westernstageprops.com for both bullwhips and stockwhips. Two of my favorite stockwhip makers are Chris Barr (www.deadringer.com.au) and Russell Schultz.
Four targets in one crack: Here’s a new trick I’ve been working on where I use one crack of a bullwhip to break four targets. Targets are held behind my knee, in the whip hand, in my left hand, and in my mouth. The targets used are spaghetti with marshmallows stuck on the end. The hard parts about this trick are first standing on one leg while cracking the whip, and then getting the whip to travel straight through all the targets. Getting only three of them was really easy. Getting all four took some work. Also, my new instructional DVD is coming out in a few weeks. In case you already know how to crack a whip, we also show how to cut cans in half and we show the 216 ft whip in action.
