Hi Nick,
I was a little nervous, I had bought some beeline (5/16") on a recommendation and after a few emails to yale with only one half hearted response I decided to splice the line using a conventional dbl braid industrial splice. Before everyone gets concerned that I've signed my own death warrant and I will surely plummet to my demise, I have to tell you that my original thinking was I wanted the cover on the eye and the splice would be strong enough, technora (75% of the cover) is tough stuff too. After finding a post from Nick back in April I started to question my reasoning.
...So I got out the 8N, threw a log chain around a large tree and tethered an eye and eye botched spliced beeline between the two with a 23kN DMM biner in line as a "gauge". Well my doubts about the poor splice were unfounded, much less the splicing technique. With the 5k+ lbs. force it would have taken to break the biner the splice would have had to maintain over 60% of beelines tensile, I'm assuming more. The other part to this "test" is the force was somewhat of a bouncing force, with the traction varying and my clutch control not the greatest. I think ropes probably respond to an initial shock load better than aluminum, how ever worthless the line might be afterwards, how that correlates to how much better I feel about the splice now I don't know.
The other thing that was kind of interesting was that there was what seemed to be little spots of wax between the strands of the outer cover of the eye afterwards, they must wax the strands and the force before breaking squeezed it out. It might be a good indication of the beeline being over stressed if one was ever in doubt.
In short I'm not recommending that people start disregarding the manufacturer's instructions and splice their line however they want, I just wanted to share what I thought was an interesting experience.