Monday, February 23, 2009

It's not me, It's him....


Or rather, it. The other day I got a chance to spin on my friend Anne's wheel. It is a beautiful double treadle and it is the only wheel that I have ever touched besides "The Beast". It was a totally diffferent creature. I only spun on it for a few minutes but it was enough to tell me what I needed to know, the problem is not me, and my ever growing severe dislike for the beast is at least somewhat justified. It is just not the wheel for me. However I am not even near financially able to get a different wheel at this point so I took my experience with "the good wheel" and went home to make some adjustments to the evil one. I realized that other than the horrible noises it makes and the problems with the take up, The thing that made it unusable was that the drive band was popping off every time I would treadly more than two or three times in a row. So I went home and looked at it some more and figured out that the drive band actually has nothing to do with me, it's a design defect. So I started looking around the house for something to try to fix the problem and after looking everywhere and not finding anything usable to stop the bobbin from sliding all over the place, causing the drive band to pop off I decided to wrap some roving arond the empty space to keep it in place. It works, and the pressure on the bobbin not only keeps it in place (and that means that the drive band stays put) but somehow my yarn is now winding on the bobbin like it is supposed to. I know that it is a temporary fix, eventually I will have to find something more permanent to hold the bobbin in place but for now it's usuable, at least on the biggest ratio thingy. See the huge amount of normal looking yarn on that bobbin?!? I spun that! and the damn drive band didn't pop off once while I was doing it! I still plan on saving up to buy a new and decent wheel, but at least I can do more than plying on this one until I do.

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