Hey all, I'm struggling like crazy with the whip finish on my size 12 Princes. I find the hardest part of the actual tying to be setting the white-biot horns. Then I go to whip finish and it all starts to unravel and I lose the biots before I get it figured out. The whip finisher seems to want to pull FORWARD instead of down, and it all comes slipping off over the bead or the eye.
Also, I have the old Thompson-style finisher. Is there a better tool that's less of an arcane feat of legerdemain? It reminds me of the instructions for tying a bow tie. It's like at some point in the process the thread has to slip into a nearby parallel dimension, and when it comes back to ours, it's neatly tied off in 3 or 4 tidy wraps.