Joe, I have been making double braid eye splices with the instructions in The Marlinspike Sailor book by Hervey Garret Smith for many years now. I highly recommend that you buy this book. It has a great wealth of information on knots and fancywork particular to 3 strand. That said, it also details well the verbatim Samson instructions. I too at the beginning made some waste in learning but once I got the hang of it, things work pretty good. Bruce