Fly Shuttle - Four Boxes

Sally asked on Weavolution how a multiple box fly shuttle works.  Sometimes you just have to see it to understand.

When I added air assist a while ago, we also upgraded to four boxes instead of the original two.  Eventually I found the four boxes too heavy to comfortably shift by hand so I asked Doug to design and build an electronic assist.

However, I think you can still see how the mechanism would work by hand.

The boxes are stacked one on top of the other and by means of a cable at the top which runs over a pulley, the boxes can be moved from one position to the other.  The boxes are 'balanced' - in other words, when you move a box up on one side, the box 'elevator' on the other moves down.

Not all looms are configured in this manner.  In some looms when you shift the boxes they both rise or lower.  Some looms are meant to only have even colour pick repeats and there is just one box on one side of the loom with multiple boxes on the other.

Human beings are endlessly ingenious.  :)

Finished the Maitland book and will start the newest Kim Harrison today during clinic.  Two hours to just sit and read.  What's not to love?  ;)

April Spools Day

Meg has challenged weavers to post photos of their spools/bobbins.

basket tied to my bench holding shuttles and bobbins - which are mostly empty as I finished the spring green towels last night - my shuttles and bobbins are from Leclerc

pirns for fly shuttle - I have an industrial pirn winder and fly shuttles/pirns

So much nicer than April Fool's Day, don't you think?  Thought I'd include a shot of the pirn winder, too.

Equipment Fail

with just the beginning of the 25% green Fox Fibre yarn showing at the top - click to biggify

Yesterday the fly shuttle on the left hand side began to fail again.  I wasn't able to 'throw' from the left hand side at all with just half a yard left to weave of the white weft cloth so I finished that off last night by hand throwing. 

This morning Doug examined the piston and air system and we think we have finally diagnosed the problem.  Unfortunately we're not sure what the fix will be.  I offered my opinion but Doug doesn't agree so he'll try to consult with some pneumatic people and see what they recommend.

Which meant that I still can't use the fly shuttle today.  Since I was anxious to start the Fox Fibre cloth it meant I was back to hand throwing this afternoon.

Are fly shuttles really that much faster?  Oh yes.  In the same time I was able to weave a yard and a bit (45 minutes) with the fly shuttle, I was only able to just barely scrape through 18 inches of woven cloth using a hand shuttle.  Which wouldn't be bad in itself, but the cloth is just wide enough that it puts stress on my neck and so I'm feeling the strain now.  Rather than weave again I may just shut the loom down and get cracking on the Magic text edits.   Well, I won't shut the loom down yet - but I will open those text files.  My web master will be home from his holiday today and he'll likely be expecting some work.  :}

Currently reading A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley.  In spite of the very English setting and characters in this book the author is actually Canadian.  I can't remember who recommended the series but I'm very much enjoying it and hoping AB is busy writing the next one!

Spring Flowers

A tiny, perfect little orchid

bouquet delivered a week ago and still going strong

Latest arrangement

Plum shawl warp

April is not the nicest month here, especially when winter has overstayed it's welcome.  The tulips in my front bed are barely above ground, buds still tightly furled.

So it was especially nice to be gifted with lovely fresh flowers the last couple of weeks - their cheery blossoms chasing the drab grey days away. 

The plum shawl warp is turning out very nicely, too.  Often when I do a run of something on the same warp I will try to make each item different in some way - changing the treadling/tie up or the weft yarn.  Since this yarn is all about stash reduction and I know that this particular combination makes a lovely quality of cloth, and because I am also trying to use up a bunch of very fine yarn for weft, I'm making all of the shawls on this warp the same.   Besides, with shows in the Seattle area (2), here, Vancouver and Calgary, hopefully the shawls will sell in different geographic regions.  :)

The weft is a lace weight alpaca and I'm hoping to use it up on either this warp, or another.  I think I've got 5 or 6 more shawl warps in the queue.

Unfortunately just before lunch time the fly shuttle stopped working.  The piston on the left hand side came apart so I took that as a sign to take a break, have lunch and do the repair after I ate.  I have to dig out the wrenches that will remove the bolt that holds the piston coupling onto the picker, screw the end part of the coupling back onto the piston itself, then reattach that to the picker.  Not a big deal, but awkward with my ankle still tingling and protesting too much flexing. 

But Doug isn't home and won't be for several hours, so if I want to finish this shawl today I have to be the loom mechanic.

Flying Shuttles

Two types of flying shuttle



Industrial pirn winder

Whenever my warps are wider than 30" I turn to my trusty flying shuttles.

When Allen Fannin was alive he often salvaged equipment from mills that were either upgrading or shutting down. Thus the Whitin pirn winder came my way, along with half a dozen shuttles and about 1000 pirns that had been used in a fancy goods mill. I bought two heads, thinking I would set each up for different grists of yarn, but then decided that one suited the majority of my needs and we have just left the second head to use for parts if so needed. So far there is in excess of 1700 hours of winding time on the winder. (We track time used for servicing.)

The industrial fly shuttles are larger and heavier than the shuttles supplied with the AVL loom.

To compare - 41 cm vs 38 cm and 448 grams vs 352 grams.

When weaving the full width (60") on the loom, the lighter weight shuttles will sometimes lose momentum and not make it all the way across to seat themselves properly in the shuttle box. I'm sure they are fine on a narrower loom, but.....I only use the loom's shuttles when I have to use something unusually thick or textured - otherwise my first choice is always the heavier industrial shuttle.

Some people wonder if the heavier weight becomes a problem. Not with the fly shuttle. In fact, I found I had to exert much more effort with the lighter shuttles in order to get them from one side of the loom to the other than with the heavier ones.

And I just love the industrial winder. As long as I've set the tension properly and keep the carousel filled with pirns, it will chug along quite nicely thank you very much, winding perfectly filled pirns. Yes, I occasionally have a problem, but not anywhere near as often as when I have to hand wind pirns. For example, I didn't leave quite enough room at the tip of the pirns when I set the winder up yesterday and one of the pirns sluffed some of the yarn off the tip today. I gave myself a good talking to for being so careless. :^)

Next Shawl Warp

Next shawl warp


I had originally purchased this yarn - a blend of merino wool, bamboo and silk - to re-sell, but there were some problems with the shipment and I don't feel comfortable offering it to others. :(

So now I have to figure out how to use it up myself. Once again I'm working on stash reduction.

I finished the first shawl warp last night, and even though it hasn't been wet finished it's looking good on the beam. Good enough that I decided to go ahead do another shawl warp. Again this will be a fairly simple twill, the weft will likely be either one of the pinks or corals. I may be bold and go with a light purple for one of them, just to see how it looks. ;)

This time I wound the warp a bit shorter (15 yards instead of 20) so that I could have a wider width, this time for squares instead of rectangles. One benefit of this wider warp is that I can use the fly shuttle instead of a hand shuttle. The down side is that the yarn is a bit too thick to use in the industrial shuttles, so I have to use the AVL shuttles instead. But since the warp isn't the full 60" width, the lighter weight AVL shuttles should not be too bad.

On a personal level, I convinced my doctor to let me stop taking the diuretics last week, and my bp has responded by leaping upwards. He wants me to start taking them again, but now it's too close to my departure for Seattle, so I begged off until I get back. (I can't change any medications for 7 days before leaving the country or my travel medical insurance is voided.)

In my heart, I'm hoping that by the time I get back on the 15th my body will have gotten used to not taking them and that it will settle down again. My bp had actually been excellent - even a bit on the low side - which is why the doctor allowed me to stop taking the diuretic. :}

I've just not been feeling great for the last couple of months, and was hoping to reduce the amount of chemical intervention in my system. The good news is that since stopping the diuretic I've been able to sleep through the night, which I'm hoping will help alleviate some of the fatigue that's been plaguing me.

Barbara commented on my reading. Well, I do a whole lot of things rather than clean house. :) Reading is one of them.

Four Boxes

Someone emailed me today asking if the four box fly shuttle was really useful or if it was 'overkill' as her friends were advising her. :)

When I ordered the loom originally (1983) I ordered it with the double box fly shuttle. Over the years, I found the double box useful even though I didn't use it all of the time.

When I ordered the air assist for the loom in the late 1990's, I was weaving for a fashion designer and quite often fiddling around with 3 and sometimes 4 shuttles. It made sense for me to upgrade to the four box fly shuttle to accomodate the designs I was weaving for my client so that I could weave them more efficiently.

After having AVL assure me it would be impossible to fit the four boxes to my loom, I ordered it anyway and Doug found a way to fit it on the underslung beater of my loom.

I then challenged him to come up with a way to change the boxes using the air assist system. Again he was assured by 'experts' that it would be impossible, and again he found a way. :D

Quite frankly I haven't been using the fly shuttle much for the last 3 years as I've been mostly weaving scarves and hand throwing. But that's the thing about tools. They wait very patiently for when they are needed again.

This project is using 7 shuttles. I'm winding the metallic by hand on the pirn because it won't work on the industrial pirn winder, so I have one AVL shuttle and 6 of the industrial shuttles. Four of the shuttles are in the boxes, the others are parked on the stool next to me and I change them out as required.

I expect that the yarns trailing toward the stool are visible in the enlarged picture. I stopped weaving tonight after the 8th headdress because I need to wind more of the metallic. Plus I'd made such good progress that it felt like time to quit and work on the transcription of WeaveCast episode 35. I've been wanting to listen to the interview with Tom Beaudet for a long time, but just haven't had the time to do that until now.

But to answer the question of whether or not the four boxes are useful? It depends. If you need them, you really need them. If you don't - well, they won't complain if you don't use them. :)

Headdresses

The warp for the headdresses is beamed. Generally I wouldn't set up the AVL for such a short warp (5 yards including an 'extra' yard for sampling) but the warp is 32" wide so I can use the fly shuttle on it. Notice I've offset the warp 4" to the right to compensate for the longer travel distance the weft makes when it goes to the right side of the loom.

Since the weaving requires 7 colours (shuttles), the four box fly shuttle will help me keep the weft yarns in order. When I need to use that many different shuttles, I drag a tv tray over to park the ones not currently being used.

The headdresses are to co-ordinate with the sashes, so I took the colours and sequence from the sash and will need to do some proto-types before I can firmly decide on how many picks of each colour. The sash is about half the width of the headdress, so I may have to do some fiddling in order to get things set - hence the extra yard.

The dancers want some gold metallic in the headdress, so where the yellow appears in the sash will be replaced with metallic, plus I'll bracket some of the other colours to sparkle it up.

I'm listening to Leonard Cohen - Live in London, and cheerfullness keeps breaking out. ;)

Currently reading The Boy's Tale by Margaret Frazer

Ukrainian Skirts and Seconds

Ta-Daa! Here is the fabric for the skirts beamed. I've just started transferring the bouts to the long stick that I use to carry all the bouts together to just behind the heddles for threading.

This warp is relatively narrow at 32" in the reed, so it has been off set to the right by 4" in order to make sure the fly shuttle works properly.

I've been thinking a lot about seconds and as usual with weaving, the answer is 'it depends'.

Partly it depends on what the flaw is that makes a textile a 'second'. If the flaw is something that does not compromise the function of the fabric, I have no difficulty selling or giving it away - with a caveat that it *is* flawed.

Flaws that can be fixed are always fixed to the best of my ability, and once fixed may lift the textile from 'flawed' to perfectly able of being sold as a 'first'.

Threading errors can't be fixed once the fabric is woven and ultimately I don't mind selling those seconds to other weavers. Who better able to appreciate that - once again - I've proved myself all too human and made a mistake?

Dye lot differences are another 'flaw'. Sometimes dye lot differences are all but invisible on the loom and only pop out at your eye after wet finishing. Again, nothing that will detract from the function of the fabric, but something that can be a lot more obvious than a threading error.

It all depends............

So my conclusion is to judge each 'second' on a case by case basis. :}

In the meantime, a weaver has offered to buy some of my seconds. Thanks Barbara! And when I looked at the pile, there weren't as many as I'd feared. Just a couple left now.

As for the Special Promotion on Art Fire? I've come up with an idea for May 9-July 9 and will test drive that option when the time comes. Stay tuned!

Currently reading The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry