50 mm whorls

The new whorls are about dialed in. I am pleased that they allow sustained bobbin speeds in the range of 3,400 rpm.  That is not peak bobbin speed, but is sustained bobbin speed. When spinning 5,600 ypp worsted (10s), that is 10 yards per minute.  Suddenly, turning out a knot free hank of 560 yards in less than 90 minutes is not a problem.  The intended weight of such hanks is 45 grams, and mine are running between 40 and 50 grams.  I think pretty good for hand spinning.  Spinning 20s (22 grams) goes at about the same rate or even a little faster.

My critics look at my pix, and say that I spin "thick and thin".  Perhaps!, but the average comes out to the grist that I want.  Can they sit down and spin their "uniform" singles, to produce 560 yards of the grist that they intend in 90 minutes?

With DRS, and these speeds, the spinning process is different.  There are videos of the way that I spin on this blog.  The top is wound onto the distaff, and is pulled off with my right hand.  DRS controlled takeup pulls the yarn out of the tip of the drafting triangle, while  my left hand controls how much twist runs into the drafting triangle.  The fibers in the top are parallel, and remain parallel in the drafting triangle, so that the final thread is full worsted. In other modern worsted drafting techniques, the fibers have a tendency to become skewed in the drafting triangle, and thus they must be pulled out straight and parallel again. This skewing of the fibers is inherent in the tension required to oppose the continuous take-up from a flyer/bobbin assembly not controlled by DRS.  I do not have  to resist that continuous take-up so I do not bunch up the fibers and push them out of their parallel alignment. My right hand controls attenuation, and my left hand controls twist, I do not draft per se.  This is not a process that works with Scotch Tension, Irish/German Tension, or double drive where DRS is not strictly controlled. It works better with finer singles. This is the fast and easy way to hand spin fine worsted singles.  And, If I have the drive band in the correct groove in my whorl, I know that the resulting hank will be close to the intended grist.

A video of the process shows me sitting there, making tiny hand motions.  It looks like I am treadling and nothing is happening.  The flier is moving much too fast to be captured on video. And, the video does not capture the thread being formed and wound.  At higher grists, the thread just disappears, so it looks like I am just sitting there treadling with no evidence that thread is being formed.

Yesterday, I did make a whorl for shirting/hosiery singles (soft and firm twist 40s, 22,400 ypp).  In a world where much of the wool was 40 count, it may very well be, that for spinners, it was faster to let the fiber flow through their fingers as above, to produce 40s, than to put extra effort into drafting thicker singles.  That is, the spinners traded more treadling effort for less drafting effort. And, the weavers gladly accepted the finer plies because it gave the fabrics a much nicer drape and hand.

Wood blanks to make whorls for "fines" are stacked  on the work bench beside the lathe. These will be for the #0 flier, but I have not designed that bobbin yet.  And, there is a real chance that fines will need a higher ratio accelerator.

A good production rate for shirting using these tools/techniques is 5 or 6 yards per minute, and the drafting technique works better at rates above 3 yards per minute.  This makes it seem like 240 yards per hour (bobbin =3,000 rpm) was a good commercial rate for a hand spinner.  Thus, a spinner could likely produce 4 worsted hanks per day.  Woolen spun requires more twist for the same grist, and thus with a wheel, my woolen yarn production at this grist is close to 200 yph.  For spinning fines, I have pushed bobbin speed as high as 5,000 rpm, allowing fines (more than 30,000  ypp) to be produced at 5 or 6 yards per minute.  This is fairly high effort and noisy, and I am not sure whether this could be a commercial rate.  

This rate of production can be easily sustained without ball bearings.  A wheel running at 3,000 rpm using leathers, bronze against steel and wood against metal bearings can sustain such speed when lubricated with lard oil. It is noisy, but all those bearing surfaces seem to last for at least 4,000 hours of use.

All in all, I think that professional spinners with flyer/bobbin wheels could have spun between 200 and 400  yards per hour of singles in the range of  5,600 ypp -10,200 ypp and between 200 and 250 yph  for grists in the range of  22,400 ypp (e.g., shirting and hosiery) .

More on Twisty Sticks

A twisty stick is a piece of wire 8-12" long with a hook at one end.  The Scandinavians make, big, tapered, wooden ones, but I am interested in the British tradition.

They were used for grading wool in the time of Chaucer, and it makes sense to me that a spinning tool was used to determine how fine a wool can be spun.  Anyway, Chaucer was hundreds of years after great wheels had been introduced for the fast spinning of woolen yarn, so twisty sticks are likely an old and deep tradition.

Alden Amos uses 1/8" wire and gives directions with drawings for making them in his Big Book of Handspinning. He likes them, and considers them an essential tool - the kind of thing that spinning guilds should make for every member as guild projects.  I like 2 mm steel wire and make them a bit longer (10.5" over all).  Mine weigh about 5 grams, and I use them for yarn grists that I would use a 5 gram spindle with whorl, e.g. ~30,000 ypp.  An iron hook from cheap, soft iron wire bound into the split end of a dogwood twig with a bit of linen thread and some glue makes a 2 gram twisty stick.  It works. With  half an inch of iron wire, linen thread, hide glue, and a sharp flake of chert, an iron age spinner could make one in a few minutes. It has about the same size shaft as AA's twisty sticks so it will be about as fast, but it only uses half an inch of thin iron wire. This gives us an idea as to why they are called "sticks".  A twisty stick is a drop spindle with a hook, but no whorl, and is often made entirely of metal.

I find that I can do a thigh roll with the twisty stick with one hand do a long draw draft with the other hand and quickly have a good make of yarn. The draft and the thigh roll can occur at the same time.  Then, I can drop the drafting hand, and the return thigh roll will wind on the yarn. The wind on is backwards.  There is almost no wasted motion.  Where a little more twist is required,  the twisty stick can be given an extra shove and released for a moment at the end of the forward thigh roll. Then the twisty stick will deliver a surge of twist to the yarn. The process is very fast. It is not something I have seen any other modern spinner do. It is not in the literature.  This is very odd.  The copp is built to wind off as an end feed package.

However, I do not know how to spin worsted with a twisty stick. So what I produce on twisty sticks are "weaving quality" woolen yarns. The quality would improve if I would practice. The problem is that even the best twisty stick is not as fast as my AA modified wheel, so my tendency is to spin any yarn on my wheel.   Thus, I am not likely to put the required practice time into twisty stick spinning, and I will not achieve and maintain professional competency with the tool.

Still, I have no doubt that Iron Age Brits used this method to produce woolen cloth for export.  I would not be surprised to discover that this was the "rolling on the thigh" method described for Bronze Age Greeks.  It is a concept that would allow a textile professional to produce less expensive woolen cloth.

The wire gets brittle and breaks. What the archaeologist would find a few hundred years later is a small piece of wire.  Any archaeologist ever see anything like that in a Bronze Age or Iron Age site?  Any chance that such an artifact has been found and incorrectly identified?

We have not really thought about hand spinning with a spindle on an industrial scale (e.g., ship-loads of cloth) for a long time.  Linen and hemp need a spindle with whorl because the long fibers and low twist per inch require slow insertion of twist. Thus, we see the spindles with whorls in the Egyptian drawings. Silk also has very low tpi, and want slow insertion of twist. Spinning worsted wool requires a whorl because both hands need to be free to draft, and therefore spindles for worsted spinning need whorls to store momentum and gradually transfer the twist to the yarn over a period of time . This is what we see depicted on Greek urns. Weaving wants worsted warp, so wool cloth production always set a demand for worsted thread, and we find  lots of whorls in every hand spinning culture.

However, woolen and cotton spinning just want lots of twist insertion. Woolen and cotton can absorb twist very rapidly. Drafting can be with one hand, so one hand can keep the spindle turning at a very high speed. If one hand is devoted to tending the spindle, there is no need to store momentum.  One can get the highest rotation speeds and therefore the fastest yarn production from a spindle with no whorl.  The spindle can be spun up very fast, and  all the twist energy transferred to the yarn almost instantly, rather than momentum stored in the whorl.  Over all, the process can be much  faster than modern spindle spinners using whorls think is possible.

This can be seen by the fact that the basic unit of woolen production was a hank of 1,600 yards, while the basic unit of worsted production was a hank of only 560 yards.  Yes, I think that in a world where all spinning was done by hand with a spindle, a yard of worsted was worth 3 yards of woolen. Wool yield, wool preparation, and spinning effort are all factors, but I would also say that in a given time, a woolen spinner would be expected to spin ~3 times the yardage of a worsted spinner.  We do not see this today because both woolen and worsted spinners use spindles with whorls that all rotate at the same slow speed.  Thus, woolen spinners spin at the speed of worsted spinners.   And the goal is better yarn, rather than  faster yarn.

Victorian ladies looked at the depiction of Egyptian linen spinners, Greek and Roman worsted spinners, and decided that all spindles need whorls.  Modern spinners (after 1960) took this as the wisdom of the ages. They felt that spindles needed whorls - everybody knows that, why would they stop and test this bit of folk wisdom? They did not think about spinning faster by using a spindle without a whorl.  They were spinning for a hobby, they did not care how fast they could spin.  In fact, showing off how fine and fast one can spin is considered rude.  When hobby spinners want to spin woolen faster they use a great wheel or charkha.   

I think spindles for worsted spinning need much higher moments of inertia than spindles for woolen spinning.  I find it amusing that this difference does not show up in the spindle market place.  It does not matter to me because I make my own spindles, and mostly I spin with my wheel.  

The above will raise some hackles  Any hand spinner that can sit down and spin wool at its spin count (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_count) is very welcome to tell me that I am full of shit.  Any person that cannot hand spin wool at its spin count should be polite.  

Flier Whorls

For the last hundred years or so, DD flier and bobbin whorls have had "V" and "U" drive band grooves respectively.  This worked with the typical DRS of 1.2 and  the resulting required slippage.  The "V" groove in the flier whorl makes precise DRS for very fine threads more difficult.

With a precise DRS, much less slippage is required and the  drive band grooves can both be "U" shaped to facilitate  precise DRS for very fine threads.

This is a bit of a problem with Ashford Fliers, but Alden Amos's fliers use a threaded connection between the flier axle and the flier whorl.  This makes it easy for the home mechanic.  Anybody with a small wool lathe can make a new flier whorl to go with their home made bobbins.

From right to left, a piece of board sawn cherry, a 5/16"steel threaded insert with an Allen head set screw in it, set screw with cap nut and washer, whorl blank turn round, and a finished whorl.

The board is bored with a ~25/64" hole, and the threaded inset screwed in using wood glue as a lubricant. The cap nut and washer allow the set screw to be used as a turning mandrel.  (Cap nut in 3-jaw chuck, tail stock center in depression in end of set screw.) Turn the blank.

To finish the groove, I use a scraper ground from a high quality HSS skew chisel. The cutting edge used to produce the bottom of the "U" should be very sharp.

Finished assembly and some 5,000 ypp worsed Cotswold single from this morning's spinning.

Math for calculating dimensions is in Alden Amos's,  Big Book Handspinning.

A recipe for belt dressing is also in BBH.

I just noticed how dirty my spinning wheel is.  (It is dirty, but it has been oiled every hour during use.)  I will clean and wax it real soon now.  These days, my wax for all wooden tools is equal weights of walnut oil and bees wax melted together.  It is non-toxic and it drys to a water and alcohol proof finish that does not yellow.   However, this mix does take a while to dry.