Thursday, December 19, 2013

Where Did That Hour Go?

I have a gadget on my 40" AVL Folding Dobby loom that I rely on a great deal. It is called an "automatic pick advance" and in theory it allows you to weave continuously without advancing the warp manually with the pawl and ratchet. It is an impressive looking piece of equipment that consists of metal gears, ratchets, pawls, a rod that go through the holes in the beater and a giant bicycle chain. One can switch out the gears to different numbers of teeth, move the picker assembly up and down the beater leg, and make a few other changes. This allows you to match the automatic pick advance to your "pick out" or the number of wefts per inch. All this is great if you can get it working but it takes a lot of fiddling, selecting the right gear and selecting the right hole in the beater. The problem is that if the "pick out" is incorrect the wefts will be spaced and not totally beaten into the warp OR the wefts will build up and then the cloth will have to be advanced manually defeating the purpose of the automatic advance. AVL provides a table with various adjustments, different gear sizes, the beater hole position etc. but much depends on how tight the warp is, the type of yarn, and even the weather! The table only provides a starting point. So that's where the hour went. For now it is all good and it is a pleasure to weave when it works correctly.

1 comment:

  1. Yes, it can take a while to get it set up but once it is, it's great.

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