Thunder and lighting

Alden Amos has "FIXED" my wheel.  Now it is 10 to 15% faster, with measured flier speed in the range of 2,500 rpm, the disagreeable vibration at 1,600 rpm is gone, and it is like WOW! This flier reduces the effort to spin 250 yards of  11,000 ypp worsted single per hour from "moderate" to "easy".  Treadle effort is less. All from a new flyer/bobbin assembly.  Production of threads in the 40,000 - 50,000 ypp range is 4 or 5 times faster than I could mange with the stock Ashford DD flier.

We did not even touch the Mother of All. We are still using standard Ashford flier bearnings.  Alden made three bobbins for this flier, with DRS set for grists of 6,000, 11,000 and 50,000 ypp.  The price and wait was reasonable for such custom work.

Flier/bobbin as made by Alden.

If I had this flier early on, I would not have spent so much time messing with drive bands.   Note that it was not the bearings that were the problem, it was the aerodynamics of the flier.  If you are going to spin at 1,000 rpm, you do not need to mess with all of this stuff (e.g., aerodynamics & drivebands), but it will take you all morning to spin 560 yards of  11,000 ypp worsted single.

 Single wound off  of a bobbin I made this morning.  

It is something of a pain in the neck,

 because it is a bit finer than the rest of the singles for this project.

The tachometer tells me the flier hit speed of 3,800 rpm while spinning this.

I out sourced the flier, because I cannot do dynamic balancing.  I can make a flier that will run at 1,000 rpm.  I cannot make a flier that runs this smooth, at these speeds. Flier/bobbin assemblies made by other wheel makers may be prettier and have fancier bearings, but they do not have the specific differential rotation speed (DRS) that I wanted. Alden Amos is the only wheel maker that I know, who really understands DRS.

Every design has compromises, and every designer weights those compromises differently.  Out of long experience with what people do to their spinning equipment, Alden's designs are conservative. Alden's designs always work, and they endure.