29/07/2012

A few AVL-tips

So many tips-and-tricks are obvious, once you’ve heard them... here are some of mine.

From the ground up; front to back:

Those irritating metal bars that protect the treadle pulleys, where the apron bar (and sometimes the cloth) so often catches:


now covered with a piece of cardboard – no more catching:


(I used a piece of paper for years, but when it tore it got replaced with cardboard)

The beater top that goes with the double fly-box used to be attached to the boxes. As I quite often change between single and double box, I had problems every time I wanted to change: how to handle a 60” beater top with a heavy lump at each end?
The answer (unfortunately out of focus):


My shafts are numbered. (Thank you, Laura – when you told me, I was still so much in countermarch mode. On the CM I constantly take the shafts off and on – no way I would number them) Numbering them "the American way" also helps if I print out a threading using numbers.


Next, I have a permanently installed holder for the brake weight:


Then, following the ground-up-rule of above, there is the “grenade pin” on the cloth storage roller – it has got a hole for storage when not in use. (OK, it is nearly always in use, but once it fell into a box full of yarn – that never happens anymore.)

(The number comes from the time I was disassembling the loom to take it to a show. Nearly all older Swedish looms are permanently marked some way or another.)

At the back, first comes the numbered sectional. It is numbered two ways: from the middle outwards and from left to right.


Lastly, I have taken the top off of the tension box "raddle". (Laura has a much more sophisticated system here – I just use painter’s tape if needed.)


The pivoting reed still has it’s top – I would like to take it off, but the tines get unstable and I don’t think it would survive for long without the stabilisation.

Still no luck on the picker return front. The buttonhole elastic now has survived about 10000 picks each without sagging, and I have a whole roll of it...

2 comments:

Laura Fry said...

Looms are tools - if they need to be adapted for better use..... :)
cheers,
Laura

Kerstin på Spinnhuset said...

Absolutely! - it has always amazed me that "all" Swe weaving teachers used(?) to tell the students that they had to take the same measurements *every single warp* to determine where (for instance) the pulleys went, when *everything* would have been so much easier had [the students] marked the loom(s) instead...
So this is why all my looms beaters have their mid-points marked, all the reeds too - had I owned more CBs they would have had several marks, too.