Crafts Tableau III: some details

This is to finish up some last details on the construction of Ye Crafts Tableau, as Olde Englyshe might put it. The spinning wheel was a fun piece of work.
The hardest part of the spinning wheel is the wheel itself. And here it is under construction, held up by the inevitable hemostat. All of it, as I recall, was alder wood. The hub was turned on the Taig. The spokes were then put into drilled holes in the hub. When I have nothing else to post, I will do a post on "the poor man's dividing engine", or how to divide a circle into equal parts with a minimum of equipment. The rim was planed down from a strip of alder, maybe willow -- I couldn't tell them apart then, I can now -- steamed, and bent around the spokes.
Shallow holes were drilled in the rim to take the spokes. The rest of it was easy:
Here you see Weaver poised at her spinning wheel. I wish I could get the bobbin to rotate. Too much to ask at this scale; the wheel is about 40mm long. But the belt does go around!

Next detail is Woodworker's tools. He had to have a saw and a plane, of course.
I happen to have a fretsaw with an impressive collection of blades. One of them was about 1mm wide, and it broke. It did very well for woodworker's saw blade. When it came down to pegging it in pace, I chickened out and used super-glue! It is a perfectly functional saw, about 20mm of blade. I put the tensioning rope ( read threads) on it later.

Woodworker's plane actually works. The blade was microforged from a finishing nail. Amazingly, the nail actually hardened. Off day at the nail factory, I suppose. So I tempered it and put an edge on it. Later I made a chisel for him, another nail. It does chisel! And finally I made a bench for woodworker. Can't do woodworking without a bench. I regret that I didn't put a vise on the bench. Well, "history of the piece," as my son says.

And there ends the saga of the crafts tableau. On to the Music Tableau!

The Crafts Tableau, Episode I

As you must know by now, I am very fond of making Tableaux. They are sort of 3-D paintings, of vaguely Tyrolean or Bavarian character, rough-hewn -- what's the right word? dioramas, perhaps. So after more than a year's effort, I present the Crafts Tableau.
There are three characters in the tableau. There was no room for more; one of my self-imposed rules is that it all has to fit on one slice of log. In Front is Smith. He is, of course, hammering on an anvil. The anvil is the tip of a discarded Alaska Railroad spike, filed to shape. His hammer is a piece of scrap also filed to shape. To his right, back turned to you, is Woodworker. More later. In the back is Weaver. She is seated on her rustic chair in front of Nanoloom, which almost was Waterloo for this project. To her right is the spinning wheel.

Since Woodworker's back is turned to you, another view may be helpful.
Woodworker has a functional workbench, but alas no vise. He has a chisel, a frame saw, and a plane. These tools are about 10mm long, the saw (a frame saw) with a piece of broken fretsaw blade. All actually work. You need tweezers to operate them, but the chisel chisels, for example. At this scale, I occasionally had to cheat. So I fastened the frame saw blade to the frame with super-glue. Likewise, Smith's anvil is held to its stump by trusty super-glue. The figures behind the crafts tableau are the Woodland Tableau, which I posted about a year ago. How time flies!

The real difficulty in this tableau was the loom. It was difficult -- extremely difficult -- because I wanted a working loom. The NanoLoom deserves a post all to itself and it will get one. I will add that with extreme pains I got it working, more or less. I wove three rows. The spinning wheel was easy, but I did not insist that it work. The actual spinner is a wire ohh maybe 0.05mm diameter, a few thou for RGU fans. Too hard to get it to spin.

So finally the crafts tableau is up on my wall. It had its ups and its downs, literally. It spent summer up on my drying rack above the oil furnace. And then I bumped into it on a dark and stormy night, and down it went. Mostly, everything survived the encounter with Mr Newton's gravity, but the loom got its threads tangled beyond repair. More next post.