Inkle Loom, the sequel

[Finally straightened out this post. I plead extenuating circumstances.]

Google sometimes seems like a diabolical organization. I have spent a whole lifetime dealing with computers. Dear Google, would you please stop trying to help me? I am tired of your "outdated browser" messages. That's a rant for another day. Let us return to something more interesting, like Inkle looms. In my last post I described an Inkle loom,and showd the starting of the warping process. Here we learn how to weave on an Inle loom. To begin, you need a pattern, found in any Inkle loom book and probably all over the internet. So here's an Inkle loom all warped up.
It is really very simple. You alternate heddle (the string loops) which go to the H peg in the pic, and open strings, which go to the peg marked O. Notice that in the picture, there is a triangular space between the tension peg and the the heddles. That is called a shed in weaverspeak. All looms have at least two sheds. You could call them left-to right and right-to left, or even A and B. However, the inkler's terminology is something like Heddle and Open sheds. What you see above is the heddle shed. We need to show you the open shed, and this you make with your hand, like this:
Notice that the warps that were formerly "up" are now down. All I did was push up on the threads that go to the O (for Open) peg. Now we are ready to weave. But first, you need a couple of appliances.
Above you see the business end of the loom, the one the weaver sees. You can see the tension nut and its washer. Loosening the nut allows you to move the tension bar back and forth, setting the tension of the warp. On top are two gizmos. One is the shuttle, which is wound up with thread of the same color as the border of the warp (brown, in this case). The other I call the popsicle stick. I suspect weaver-ese is a beater. It looks exactly like a popsicle stick, but I made it myself out of birch. You lose no points for using an actual popsicle stick. I use it for beating (tell you what that means in a minute) and holding sheds open in the face of collapse. OK, we are ready to weave. Decide which way you want to go. I always go left-to-right on the heddle shed. These directions can be reversed, left for right and heddle for open. So I have the heddle shed. Now pass the shuttle through the (heddle) shed, left to right as you face the business end of the loom:

This is known as "making a shot." Now, make the open shed by pushing up with your hand, see above. Go back with the shuttle in the opposite direction, right-to left.
Now you have to "beat down" the threads. For this, I use the popsicle stick. What you do with it is to push on the shot you just took until it lies as close as you can get it to the previous shot. Picture a little fuzzy; pressed shutter too soon, not about to do whole strap over again!
And that is all there is to it. Make a shed. Pass shuttle through. Beat down. Make the opposite shed... ad nauseam. There are some caveats. Sometimes the warps will decide to stick together and not go to their proper place. Looking at the loom sideways you can detect these evil threads and push them to their rightful place. After a few shots, you have built up a few centimeters of weave.
So you just keep going until the belt is a as long as you want. You can weave all the way up to the heddles. I seldom do. When you have gone some ways, simply pull the weaving back towards you. The warps just slide around the pegs. Might have to relax the tension to get away with this. Tension is a difficult thing to gauge, you have to experiment. Depends on the thread material. When you start out, my advice is to use synthetics. They take a lot of abuse and have bright colors. Just the thing for learning. They don't stick the way other materials do.

This post has been, as they say in Latin, a via crucis. I could rant on laptop keyboards. But I won't, and wish you happy inkling.

The Inkle Loom

You have no idea how relieved I am to be posting this. I am having computer problems. I'm doing this on a laptop. I hate laptops. But if I go off on this subject I will be here all night. On with the show.

An Inkle loom is a device for weaving long narrow pieces -- belts, straps, or runners. My father made one and used it to make belts. I learned out of Inkle Weaving by Helen Bress, but there are others, q.g. An Inkle loom is an extremely simple piece of gear.
This particular loom is about about a meter and a half long, but this is totally unnecessary for most work. About 60 cm will do you for most purposes. For the purposes of this discussion you can forget everything to the right of the second upright 2x4. As you can see, it is all 2x4s and dowels, or pegs. There are three indispensable pegs. Two of them are marked "H" and "O" in the pic. The other one has a bunch of strings dangling from it. It is called the heddle peg, and the loops of string are called heddles. The other pegs are there to make long pieces. At the left is the tensioning arrangement. It is a piece of wood with a bolt screwed into it, and a nut, out of sight. It allows you to tension the weaving properly. Tying up the loops of string, or heddles, is a major nuisance but you do it only once.

You do not have to be a cabinetmaker to build this thing. Just a 2x4, a drill, a saw and some dowels. The dimensions are really immaterial. Only moderately difficult thing is cutting a long slot in the horizontal 2x4. Drill some holes and cut out the intervening material with a keyhole saw (which I did) or if you have a router, why just rout the slot.

OK, Houston, we have a loom. Now, how to use it? You could consult the internet, or read a book (which I advise) but here's weaving 050 -- remedial level. In weaving, there are long threads and cross-threads. The long threads are called warps. The cross-thread is called the weft. The first job in Inkle weaving, is to warp your loom, i.e. tie on the warp threads. This is straightforward -- in fact trivial -- but it is really tedious. Here's the start on the warping procedure.
There are two warps in this drama. The leftmost goes through the heddle. It then goes up to the heddle peg, the one marked "H" in the first pic, and around enough pegs for the length you are expecting to weave. The next warp goes direct to the peg marked "O" for open, and back again to the tensioner. I made a dreadful mistake when I did this warp. The warp, on its return, must pass under the heddle peg. I had to do this all over again. Eventually I got it right. Now I haven't told you how to weave. Coming soon, but meanwhile, the product in progress.
We are weaving a strap for the cell phone case we posted earlier. Stay tuned.

A Winter's walk

In winter I ski. When I can, that is. Sometimes it is just too cold. Even with hand-warmers, my hands freeze. This apparently is due to the fact than when one skis, one clutches the poles as hard as possible. It impedes circulation of the blood. We have no prepared tracks here at Chalupy. Do it yourself all the way. If it is really cold, my feet freeze too. So I have decided -25C is the limit for skiing. When it gets below that I walk. I wear my bunny boots, so my feet do not freeze. I wear my down parka with the fur hood (and a cap underneath that) so my head loses no heat. I wear my padded Carhartt overalls, wool shirt, long underwear, the works. Today it is -33C or so. At these temperatures, if you are having problems with C and F scales, it doesen't matter. Same thing, for practical purposes (the scales coincide exactly at -40). So it's cold!

Nice thing about walking: I can take pictures. Camera must be kept warm at all costs, or the batteries default on their duty. And I have both hands free. I can fish the camera out of the clothing and take a picture before my hands freeze to death. I have to remove super-mittens, though. No sacrifice too great for the blog.

So here is a winter walk in the Alaska bush. It is about 10AM -- just after sunrise in January. We walk down Basargin Drive. The first thing we see is...
... a couple of birch trees, young'uns bent double by the snow load. If it were spring we could make a greenhouse of of them! Alas, it is January. Maybe 70 cm of snow on the ground. Major project getting to these babies!

So on we go. We stop to look at what Little Lonely Lake is doing.
It looks rather blue. Maybe it's too cold! No, it is a camera problem. Too much contrast for proper color recording. It is really white, but it's in the shade. Very few snow machine tracks. What a pity (cynical smile). So on we go.
The rising sun is lighting up the roadside trees. Deep shadow elsewhere. Stunning, I think. After a while we reach one of the houses alogn Beryozova road. The name of the road is Russian (natch. It leads to the Russian village). It means "of the birches" road, very apt. So we come to non-village, but sometimes inhabited territory.
Lot of snow on the roof! The residents are not in residence. Perhaps they are snowbirds. But mysteriously their driveway gets plowed, no doubt by divine providence. Wish my driveway got done that way. Well, we turn back eventually and get home. We are glad to see our driveway.
We note that it is plowed (actually snow-blowered), but regret that Divine providence did not favor us. Sigh. Do it yourself, again. Note that the sun is just now clearing the trees. It must be 1100 hours. Nice thing is that the days are getting longer.

And so, home. Have a cup of tea, enjoy the warmth (if, that is, you remembered to start a fire that morning) and on with the rest of the day.

WIre Nut painter

In the continuing saga of catching up with the (wire nuts) ghosts of Christmas past we present Wire Nut Painter. This is for my son, who in addition to being a musician is an artist. So obviously...... we had to do a Wire Nut Painter. Here he is, headless. The head sports a beret made out of a .223 cartridge base.

The really hard part of this composition was the paintbrush. As I pointed out in the last post, soldering stranded wire to solid is not easy. In this case I had to solder a brush base to a solid copper wire. I haven't really figured out the thing yet, but due to some circumstances out of range of this blog, I have some ideas. Maybe next year.

Wire nut kitties

My daughter loves to sit in her armchair and read a book. Her cats like this program, being sister Himalayans with a penchant, indeed a genius for catnapping. So for her, the Wire Nut Kitty tableau.

The hard part of this program was making the cats. They (a) have tails (b) are small and (c) they have lots of bends. So it proved essential to anneal the wire first so I could bend it. With time and bending, copper rehardens from the annealed state, but we will only bend once, hopefully.
On the soldering brick at top, a completed cat, minus the head (which is of course a nut). The tail is made out of stranded wire. This is a bear to solder. It will come unstranded and apart -- like Garbo, it vants to be alone. It also heats up more slowly than the solid stuff. By the time I got to the second kitty, I had evolved a technique: leave the insulation partway on. Clamp that in a toolmaker's clamp. This curbs the Garbo effect, and holds the tail still while you solder it.

In comparison, the rest of this composition is a breeze.
The footstool is , of course, a 12 ga. shotgun shell base and the book is sheet copper; the base is wood. The only other hard part is drilling the little nuts (cat's heads) to take the wire. I might do a post on that sometime.

Meanwhile we have hit a cold spell. Morning tempoeratures around -33C, warming up to a balmy -28C or so. More on that later.

Wire nut ATV, part II

Last post we had made the chassis of the RV. Time for bodywork. The body is sheet copper bent to shape. If it were more complex it would have to be hammered out (after annealing the copper) over a wooden form. A lot of work, that. So now you know why I made a bending brake back in December. I seem to have gotten a lot of mileage out of old glasses cases.
The repoussé hammer also was made at that time; it is invaluable for flattening the copper before you bend it. The rest is soldering bodywork. The headlights are, of course, .44 mag shell bases. The wheels, 12 gauge shotgun shells on copper-wire axles. Next I made the stick figure and a seat for same.
Slopped solder a lot. Had to clean it up! The stick figure has the obligatory nut for a head. Onwards to the steering wheel, which was a bit of a job. You must anneal (soften) the wire before you can really bend it well. For this you heat the wire red-hot in a propane torch and cool it. You can actually run cold water on it because copper (unlike steel) will not quench-harden. When you have it annealed it bends beautifully.

Then you bend it around a suitable former. Then you solder on the shaft.
In all this soldering the hard part is holding the stuff still while you do the deed. Hence my post back in December on Hold It!

So the ATV is more or less complete. We need to build a mountain for it to climb, of course.
Then I added a stray moose (suggested, of course). But I can't find the picture. When it turns up, if indeed I took it, I'll post again. I am always uploading my pictures to the wrong place. I am tying the wheels down to the ramp in the picture above, because it will not do for our vehicle to slip. I used, of course, lettuce wire. It is indeed well for my art that I love lettuce; it keeps me in craft material.

Wire Nuts 2011

Now that the Christmas rush is over, I can reveal my activities. Except for one, and she lives in Florida, so you know who you are, but please be patient with me. Lot of snow on the ground, and I am reluctant to brave the 8-mile drive to the Post Office.

Anyway, this season (which starts for me in September when I start the move indoors) I went overboard with my Wire Nuts. Now everyone has obsessions. Stuff they like. So I make stick figures out of copper wire. Hardware store nuts are used as heads. The general mise en scène is supposed to convey the essence of the obsession. However, this is Alaska. So there are some more rules. Each figure must contain at least one spent cartridge, any caliber legal. Permissible materials are copper, brass, and steel (don't think I ever used it) and the last rule: it must be all either found or at worst, thrift-store stuff. So I'm metalworking. And being arty. I am doing impressions in copper. Manet, Monet, Degas and company did it in oils. Good for them. I'm not a painter.

One of our friends has a cabin in remote Eureka, AK. She is a snowmobile and ATV freak, and so she should be with a cabin in Eureka. Having done the snowmobile last year I decided to do an ATV. In fact, I set out to model a Ranger. Or a facsimile thereof. This was by far the most difficult of my projects. So here it goes. Wire Nut ATV.

In the best style of Mr David Wingrove OBE, a modeler who puts most people to shame, I begin with the chassis. When I am making these models Mr Wingrove is my constant reference. You need a picture or two to get the idea of what you want to make. Fortunately I get a lot of junk mail and I cut a picture of a Ranger out of it. Made a sketch with dimensions on it. I don't do formal scaling. I sketch and measure off the sketch. To work!

So we take some old house wire we found at the Ghost House. We strip off the plastic (not a trivial chore) and bend it into a rectangle.
For the benefit of those who would like to bend copper wire, it is no joke. It is very difficult to put a sharp 90-degree bend into copper (or any other metal for that matter). In the picture the left-lower bend is much better than the right-lower bend. Hey, I'm warming up. There are some tricks and I'll post them sometime. Now we have to silver-solder on the axles. Silver-soldering (lead-free) is much stronger than electrical solder. I have made perhaps a thousand electrical connections in my lifetime. Silver-soldering is different. You have to use a torch, an iron won't hack it. I may do a post on this technique. I use a small butane torch. So moving on...
Some more bending, some more soldering and we have a real chassis! Now we put in the engine.
This the obligatory .45 ACP shell, filed to fit the rear axle, and soldered in. Note the lettuce wire holding it in. Half the job of doing a good silver-soldering job is holding the blasted pieces together while you solder them.

Quite a ways to go, but we got us a chassis. Messieurs Manet, Monet, Degas et al would understand this. Unlike Mr Wingrove I am not making a scale model. This is an impression of a chassis, not a model. We'll tackle wheels and bodywork next post.