Selvedge Rollers

I wrote a post 10 months ago about some Selvedge Rollers that my brother Gregory had made for me. This followed on from a previous post where I wrote about a rather Heath Robinson arrangement that I had concocted.

Well, now I have the rollers in place and functioning. They are mounted on a steel rod which is held in place by metal brackets on an extra beam which I have clamped onto the back of the loom. A webbing strap runs from the bottom of the beam up over the brake drum part of the rollers and down to some weights which can be adjusted to control the tension on the selvedge thread. The second photograph shows the selvedge thread coming of the roller and extending forward to the heddles.  All good stuff and I am very happy. I can have no excuse now for knurley selvedges.

 

Selvedge Rollers aka Selvedge Beam

I am in England visiting family and friends. My brother Gregory has kindly made me a pair of selvedge rollers, one in oak and one in mahogany (the design is by Bill Koepp).

They will be so much better than my previous arrangement.

Selvedge Rollers.html

Selvedge Rollers

In an earlier post, Back of the loom, I showed some design possibilities for Selvedge Rollers. I have now come up with my version (Mark 1)  in which I have plagiarized a little bit from each of the ideas.

I bought two spinning wheel spools and mounted them on a long wooden dowel. The dowel is attached by four metal brackets to a narrow beam that sits in the currently unused mountings of the secondary warp beam. The selvedge threads are wound onto the spools and dynamic tension is applied by nylon line wrapped over the rollers and weighted with fishing sinkers.

 The system works but already I can see plenty of scope for improvement. This will all have to wait otherwise I shall never get going with some weaving. 

Back of the loom

I rewove the last 6 inches of the scarf and all is good.

I decided to critically reappraise my arrangements at the back of the loom. Have a look at the photos below - it is all a bit industrial and just asking to get itself into a pickle. The selvedges warps are on netting shuttles and at great risk of getting tangled with each other and the live tension system. The netting shuttles sometimes unravel and the weights fall off and they tend to get caught in sectional warp beam.

One of the blessings of traditional European style loom is that there is always somewhere to hang things from. So instead of letting my weighted selvedges hang from the back beam I have raised them up. I have used two broomsticks and the pictures show how the new disposition looks. I have replaced the netting shuttles with tapestry bobbins and I can see them from my weaving position. I am of an age where dealing with things above waist height in infinitely preferable to messing around below knee level so that is another plus for this arrangement.

This is all fine and dandy (as my sister would say) but ultimately I am going to have to move to dedicated selvedge rollers. I have done a bit of a web search and I have found information from AVL, Luther Hooper and Bill Koepp. I need to find a wood turner - wooden cotton reels have disappeared of the face of the earth.