building a spinning wheel

I play with wood. My suffering better half (hubby) plays with wood. We have woodworking tools, some were built from plans! (www.woodgears.ca)

I found these plans this evening:

http://www.craftsmanspace.com/free-projects/spinning-wheel-plan.html  The design reminds me of some of the modern Ashford looms R Ransom is fond of.

Building your own wheel = AWESOME!

Those look like good plans.  Cute wheel too.  I say go for it!  
Although the picture in the plans and of the wheel doesn't show it, that design is for a double drive spinning wheel.  My personal favourite style.  
On the plans, page 16 and 17, with the part they call the flyer bearing (orifice), might be a bit challenging.  It's a metal piece that will need to be manufactured somehow.  Usually, this is made as one piece with what they are calling 'flyer axel' (flyer shaft).  This makes it stronger and easier to ballance the flyer.  As two pieces, it's easy to get things out of whack which makes spinning difficult.  The orifice also needs to be smooth where the yarn goes.  (I put the common, modern, North American terms in brackets for those parts.  There's a lot of different nomenclature for spinning wheel parts around the world and over time.  No single naming is correct.)

The flyer is going to be the hardest part to get right.  It needs to be well balanced or spinning becomes a chore.  It helps if you have experience spinning on a flyer wheel so you know what it feels like to spin on a well-balanced flyer.  The other challenge is that there are never enough bobbins.  One solution for this is to buy a commercial flyer and build the wheel around that.  That way, you can get as many bobbins as you like - https://www.ashford.co.nz/flyers/product/standard-flyer-single

But of course, that's not necessary.  Lots of wheels have home made flyers.  

Another great wheel to make is a spindle wheel.  Spindle wheels can be much faster and more efficient than flyer wheels, and you don't need the fuss of bobbins.  here's a pdf of a really basic spindle wheel.  

I really like the Indian style spinning wheel.  It's much faster for cotton and silk than any of the modern wheels out there.

You're typing to a woman who should have been a machinist. I have hardcore hours both in engineering training and shop floor-line experience. I'm building up the equipment and favors to be able to do so.

Remember the chesstok speedweve? I still want to make a variation of those.

Thanks for telling me it's a doubledrive.

Deb Rebel wrote:You're typing to a woman who should have been a machinist. I have hardcore hours both in engineering training and shop floor-line experience. I'm building up the equipment and favors to be able to do so.

In that case, I recommend a flyer shaft like the one in this post http://www.fullchisel.com/blog/?p=4292

Thank you, ma'am, great link. Sometime this winter when I turn to this project, YES I will post all the lurid details and the success or reasons I'm taking up drinking and roasting marshmellows over the flaming wreckage...

Looking through my unmentionably large collection of spinning wheels in the house, I discovered that I have a wheel built to the plans linked to in the first post of this thread, or if not those plans, ones very much like it.

Sadly, the wheel isn't in working condition, but it can be made to work.  If I put a modern flyer on it and adjust the front maiden a bit, I think it will work well.  The wheel I have looks to be built in the 1980s to early 2000s.

Pictures to come soon.

I'm all eyes. Please. Right now it's weeds, more weeds, and trying to make some stuff to pay the bills.

I ran across two remainders of skeins of some 15% mohair and 85% virgin wool (originally 190 yards, I think I have two dabs about 10 yards each) from a place called Brown Sheep Yarn on the western edge of Nebraska, Mitchell, NE. Spun and dyed by them it claims.

It's incentive.

I found a book at the library the other day that might help.  spinning wheel building and restoration by Kronenberg.  

It's definitely worth a read, but I'm not certain if it's worth spending too much money on unless you intend to build/repair many spinning wheels.  If that's the case, then I think the big book of handspinning is a better investment as it teaches the mechanics of how the wheels work so you can know the necessary and sufficient conditions for making a really good wheel.  

I finally built a spinning wheel from scratch!



And you say - but wait, that's not a real spinning wheel.

And I say - exactly.  

This is my new obsession, whenever I want to build something, build it first out of gingerbread.  Gingerbread is unforgiving and will tell you where all the pressure points are.  Where things don't need to be exact and where the tiny fraction off will disrupt the whole thing.  It also makes you look at existing examples really, really closely.

And you can eat both the failure and the result.  High energy food for when a massive storm knocks out power and you don't have any instant ready to eat food in the house but have to spend 12 hours hard work fixing stuff before the next wave of the storm moves in... (see BC weather news fall 2021).  Gingerbread with icing is ideal.

Anyway, all the time I was building the failures and making compromises, I kept thinking back to this thread and how excited I would be to share my new discovery that Gingerbread is an awesome teacher.  

r ranson wrote:

This is my new obsession, whenever I want to build something, build it first out of gingerbread.  Gingerbread is unforgiving and will tell you where all the pressure points are.  Where things don't need to be exact and where the tiny fraction off will disrupt the whole thing.  It also makes you look at existing examples really, really closely.

And you can eat both the failure and the result.  

Anytime something I've been ruminating about becomes something edible, there is something right with the universe. I will definitely employ the 'first with gingerbread' method of construction as I have some plans to build an attic bedroom. It should prove both informative and yummy.

I would love to have a spinning wheel--I remember there being a segment on Sesame Street when I was a child where they spun wool after shearing the sheep and made sweaters for the kids. I thought it was awesome watching someone make the whole product, start to finish, by themselves.

O.o I cannot express how excited and happy I am to have found this.  I've been trying to find plans to build my own spinning wheel and wasn't finding anything.  Granted...my tiny apartment isn't exactly the space for it, I now have the plans for when we do have the space.  

There's a very simple, and free, set of plans that doesn't involve constructing a round, smooth, perfectly balanced wheel: Dodec wheel

There's also some nifty plans in the out-of-print book: Spinning and Weaving At Home: Making and Using Your Own Low-Cost Spinning Wheel and Loom by Thomas Kilbride (1980) for a spinning wheel made from bicycle parts. The wheel there would be nicely balanced.