What I have been doing - nerd alert

It all started with the DFW (Double Flyer Wheel).
I wanted to know where it came from (or, at least, from whereabouts in the country this kind of accelerated driving was known). I had seen something in a (borrowed) book - had to buy it for myself. Was sort of disappointed - there was a wheelwright mentioned, that much was right, but, as it were, only in passing. He had a name and a year (Abraham Hedman, 1738), but that was all there was.
I (thought I) knew I had seen something like it, many years ago, in a museum. Thought I knew which museum. Wrote to them. Wrote to several more museums, while I was "at it". Result: nothing, nada, zilch. A month later, ONE of the (by now 6) museums answered: "I don't have time to go out in the storehouse to look".
Meanwhile, I got a couple of obscure books on ILL, one of them very dull-looking: Den Ångermanländska linslöjden, en historik. (The linen works of Ångermanland, a history). It is a dull text, but once I started to really read it I found lots of, hm, nuggets(?). And lots of food for nerding...

So, here, friends, goes:

Definition of "prime linen": as you (probably will not) remember, "prime linens" come in many classes. They were (at least most of them) 1 1/2 aln (3 ft, or 88-89 cm) wide.
For class 1 there were 2720-2920 ends (or 30-32 ends/cm); for class 8 (which was NOT the finest seen) there were 4120-4 320 ends (or 45-48 ends/cm).
The History book contains some well-described examples, complete with old (and obscure) weights-and-measures.

So I got out the calculator...
One example was described as 39 alnar, 4 1/2 skålpund; 3600 ends, woven in 2299-dent reed.(If I did my calculations right, this means the cloth was 23,2 m long, weighed 1,9 kg - which would translate to 81,9 grams/metre fabric).

OK.

3066 ends x 23,2 metres of cloth = 83 520 metres of warp yarn.
But we have a weft, too. For convenience, I assumed 40 picks per cm (warp density comes out as 40,5) - which gave me another 83 500 metres.
Which gives a total of about 167 000 metres per 1,9 kg of weight.

Now, linen is numbered in Nel (Number English Linen, I believe), where the number tells how many skeins of 300 yards is accommodated in 1 imperial pound.
One yard is 0,91 metres, so 300 yards = 274 metres (rounded), which means we have 167 000 / 274 = 609,5 skeins - let's round a bit carelessly, say 600 skeins.
As an imperial lb (of today) is approx. 0,45 kg, we can go on: ( 600 / 1900 grams) x 450 = 142 (rounded)
which means this particular cloth was woven with a linen singles (*all* "lärft" is singles) of a number somewhere in the vicinity of 140/1. Handspun.

I did several calculations, approaching from different angles, 'cos I was thinking I had made a decimal error somewhere.
But - all of them came up more or less the same. There were several examples described, and they all came out with a yarn count between approx. 120 to 150. Handspun!

A picture from the book, divided in two to make it possible (I hope) to read the writings.

The caption says, roughly;
"These two photos show the strip, with thrums, cut off from the cloth for which Catharina Andersdotter got the Illis Quorum [a royal medal]. The cloth is of the seventh class, is woven through a weaving reed of 2 200 dents, contains 40 knots, or 4000 ends of warp. Every square centimetre thus counts to 40 ends of warp and circa 37 picks of weft. We have found this linen strip in the royal archives [... something "administrative" I can't translate] 1808 - 1811."
I wish... Or, on second thought, maybe not :-)

But the DFW?

Nothing much. This book tells about several "spinning schools" and some competitions - it seems that the DFW spinners always won, but that did not convince "the people". One of the arguments was that a DFW is harder to spin on (heavier to treadle, needs more concentration), and therefore, even if you are more productive/efficient for the first hour(-s - the competitions were 2 hrs), you can't spin for as many hours as a "prime spinner" usually did. Right or wrong?

Anyway. I still don't know anything about my DFW, it still doesn't work (too cold to do what needs to be done on it, the workshop is unheated) - and the only accomplishment I have done is to amass a lot more "worthless knowledge".

Here is another picture from the book:

which shows another principle for a DFW: one MOA, two flyers. Therefore it has to have two drive bands, I think - and imagine tying two drive bands so that the tensioning works for both, at the same time...?!?

Waiting for more ILL books, and perhaps I have to do some "hands-on" museum search, and...

M PET:SON

Yes, I'm still here.
And one of these days, I'll tell you about what I have been doing: nerding. (Can it be used as a verb? It certainly feels like it...)

Meanwhile, let me present one of my old spinning wheels, name of Findus (not a very good pic, but the best I could do - many discarded pics before this...)

Here is the maker's mark:

For the Swedes, it will now be obvious (I think) why he is called Findus. For all others: Findus is a cat who owns an old man called Pettson - many delightful (children's) books, issued by Opal bokförlag. (It seems some of them are translated to English. I highly recommend them to all cat lovers out there, no need to have children as an "excuse"...)

Since I love both Findus and his old man, and it did not work to link to "his" pages on Opal, I decided to help you non-Swedes with a link to amazon - here goes: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Nordqvist%2C%20Sven

Putting on the tension

The double flyer wheel is now dusted, and the wheel that drives the flyers can be taken out. So far I haven't been able to get off the bent nail that holds the other wheel in place. Of course that nail sits on the treadle-side of the axle... It looks like I may have to saw it off.

The dead leather bearings for the left flyer are out (and some of the paint with them, but that couldn't be helped). I think I probably will have to change the other (painted) bearings, too.

The left flyer is now tied in place with cords, to make trying out different placements of the (probable) tensioner possible.

There are two possible ways that I can think of.

Either the tensioner was correctly mounted as it was (coming up through the frame). As it can't be raised enough to lift the drive band, the drive band has to be threaded through the "tensioner" before knotting, and as the tensioner has only one pulley, this is the one possible path:

Or it wasn't correctly mountetd. If the tensioner is mounted the other way. It can then depress the drive band to create tension - but both turns of the band have to go under the pulley, which doesn't look right, either:

Any suggestions?

I have also found that the right-hand distaff is not original. The right-hand finial (the non-threaded one) is "clumsier" than the other (see pics in the first post), the distaff arm is slightly thicker and the distaff istself has too many knife marks (it has been carved after the turning).
I have, of course, tried to find pictures of DFWs.
On those which have included distaffs, all of them have had only one. Why is that? To me, it made good sense to have two: even on the most perfectly dressed distaff it could happen that the spinner got hold of "both ends" of a fibre?

The last about double pulleys

For now, anyway :-)

First of all: I now own one double pulley! It was there, just beside the double flyer spinning wheel - it rather seemed like a "double" day. Until I asked for the other pulley... the dealer didn't even understand the question: why should he have a pair?
Anyway, it followed me home (even though the pulleys won't turn):

In the last post about double pulleys I wondered about Grenander's sentence "[...]with two pulleys on two axles on the same level [...]"
Jean graciously sent me a picture of this kind of double pulley(s):

Thanks, Jean - I had never seen such pulleys before, but apparently they existed even here.

Anyway, when I unearthed my folding CB to ready it for a demo, I decided to try to rig a "double pulley" simulation, to see if it would work with the crossed cord tie-up.
I thought I would just tie four cords over the castle, like this:

Half an hour later I decided I wasn't very interested, after all. (IOW, I couldn't get it to balance/work...) The horses went back on, and the demo went considerably better that it would have with the crossed cords...

Conclusion: hooray for countermarches!

It was a nice and sunny day...

and we decided to take a little trip. Once we reached the destination, it was much colder and windier than at home, so the walking was cut much shorter than we had thought.
When we saw the sign to a flea market we hadn't been to, we went there instead.

On top of a shelf I spotted something

It lacked one of the flyers, the paint job was sloppy and it was too expensive for a decrepit, albeit interesting, spinning wheel. Then I spotted the other flyer, found that the bobbin turned freely and the drive pulley screw was not rusted - and it was threaded for spinning S.
So I took it down.
Everything that should turn, turned. Some things not supposed to move, moved a bit too much, but on the whole, it seemed to be (nearly) in working order.
It came home with me.

On further examination, the paint job was more than sloppy, and also consisted of at least two different paints. The outer white flakes, under that there is another (whiter) white. In some places the inner white has flaked, too - there seems to be a reddish paint under that.
At least the outer white was painted on without disassembling, but I managed to unscrew the flyer assembly with patience and some grease.

The missing left flyer's what's-it-called (the leather pieces) will take some fiddling to replace, as they, too, are "painted in".
Also the drive wheels will not come off, because they are secured in place with nails in the back, and one of the, hm, "stops" on the front is missing, too.

The "accelerating" drive wheels are interesting. I have seen something like this many years ago in Ångermanland (which, perhaps, tallies with the "prime linens"... Grenander wrote some about double-flyer wheels, but of course I have returned the book now. Maybe I have to borrow it again...). If I measured correctly, the fast wheel has a ratio of 2,5 compared to the slow.

I suppose this is the tensioner for the drive band. It moves freely, fastens with a wedge. (Hmm - wedge? Really?) But how it the drive band supposed to go - over or under? If it goes under, it is difficult to replace, as the pulley doesn't come out?

And, at the back there is this little thing, about 7-8 cm, pivoting not-quite-in-the-middle. What can it be?

The wheel has a couple of reparations done to it - one of the flyer uprights has a piece replaced, one of the flyer uprights has a new finial and the distaffs are slightly different.

And the flyers are painted, too. Even the hooks.

On double pulleys and no horses (warning, long)

(I should have been sewing, but the pins are too fiddly for the wrenched wrist. So I have been reading, instead.)

I started with Gertrud Grenander-Nyberg's Lanthemmens vävstolar (1974, ISBN 91-7108-076-7). On pages 287 f she writes about double pulleys (my translation; my comments in italics):

For plain weave, threaded on four shafts, there was a pulley type seldom used nowadays, namely two pulleys mounted on the same axle. The pulleys can be of different size. For the tying, the outer shafts were tied with the cord over the bigger pulley, which made the shaft tieup clearer (simpler?)

Important words here: CAN be of diff size. In most (all?) pictures I've seen they have been of the same (or so near the same as possible) size. (Had they been different size, they could have been called "horizontal dräll pulleys"? Has anyone seen an example of that (ie with more than two pulleys)? Edit: here.

The Finnish textile technician Helvi Pyysalo has showed that two pulleys on the same level can be used for four-shaft even-sided twill by connecting shafts one and three over one pulley and shafts two and four over the other pulley.
With this method follows that, when the shafts are lowered in pairs in four different combinations, the cords on both pulleys will move, which is (recommended, necessary? - "good") to get a clear shed.

I don't understand that: does she say that for EVERY shed on a CB loom "both cords should move"? If so: why?? Or what is it I don't understand here? With one pulley and horses that is not always the case, but sheds can be good anyway.

This can happen not only with two pulleys on two axles on the same level but also with the pulleys mounted on the same axle like on a double pulley.

Is there a difference in appearance in the two described above? (for "double pulley" she uses the Swedish "parblock", so in the text there is a distinction between the two types here.) ETA: see picture here.

It is likely that the double pulleys were used in this fashion in older times for weaving even-sided twill. With the pulleys on the same level the upper tieup was lower than if it was accomplished with several tools on different levels. Double pulleys were therefore an advantage when using the oldest looms which have low castles. This can be an explanation to the numerous double pulleys from the older times.
Nowadays, for four shafts, usually only one of the pulleys is used in combination with horses.


Same author, 25 years later, in Linnelärft i Ångermanland (2001, ISBN 91-7108-480-0), has slightly changed her ideas.

Background, about "premielärft" - roughly "prime quality linen cloth": in 18th century the "powers" divided the country and decided Ångermanland was the region to grow flax and (spin and) weave linen. To make the people more enthusiastic about it, certain standards were set, and those who fulfilled them got extra pay.

Anyway. According to Grenander, weavers of prime cloth were specialists, using special looms. Those looms were often shallower than "allround" looms - sources from the time state that an allround loom was usually about 2 1/2 aln (about 5 ft), while linen looms were only 2 aln (4 ft).

The reasoning behind that is (apart from the fact that German linen looms often were shallow) that the "free" warp is shorter, and therefore less exposed to wear (p 99).

Something I don't understand here: as linen is not elastic, shouldn't it benefit from a longer "free" warp, by distributing the stretch over a longer section?

(She goes on to say that plain weave needs less loom-depth than multi-shafted cloth, which is of course true.)

She also thinks that the double pulleys, at least those with short uprights, were used primarily by these specialist weavers.

(To me it is not clear exactly how she came to that conclusion.)

On p 103 she writes that, because of the fineness of the prime cloth, the warps had to be distributed over four shafts, and therefore the double pulleys were "the most efficient". Thus looms with double pulleys were, together with very fine reeds, the most typical tools of a "prime" weaver.

I'm still unsure of why double pulleys are "the most efficient"...

Anyway, it is apparent that she has changed her mind over the 25 years between her thesis and her last book - from thinking that double pulleys were, in effect, "old-fashioned", to thinking they were the mark of a specialist.


Just for curiosity: "prime linens" came i 8 classes. They were (at least most of them) 1 1/2 aln (3 ft, or 88 cm) wide.
For class 1 there were 2720-2920 ends ( or 30-32 ends/cm); for class 8 (the finest) there were 4120-4 320 ends (or 45-48 ends/cm). (from Uppfinningarnas bok, band 6 from 1873.

And this, my friends, was all handspun singles!

More about horses

In Sweden, everybody knows how to tie the horses. They "must" be parallel, but opposite - like this:

(well, they can be the other way around,too)

Then I found a picture on the 'net - a picture that can't be copied, only linked to.
From what I can see, the horses are tied in a pattern I have never seen before:

Let's see if this gives the right photo:

This photo of Museo-Laboratorio di tessitura a mano Giuditta Brozzetti is courtesy of TripAdvisor.

Or is she using just three shafts? I can't see the fourth, but it also does not look like the horses are tied two-to-one-shaft...
If they are, they still look like a "different" style.

This is how three shafts "should" be tied, according to Swe traditions:

Either tie one shaft to both ends of one horse, the other horse to the two other shafts (works best, IMO), or tie both horses to the middle shaft.