We are getting to know each other, and here is our first skein.
It’s over 300 metres long! This spinning wheel makes yarn faster than any other I’ve used.
It’s taken a bit of work to get to this stage. The first thing was something you may notice in that photo – borer! (You probably know it as woodworm if you’re in North America.) I’m pretty certain the bugs are all long dead but just to be sure, I squirted some stuff for killing them into all the holes, and I’m going to do it one more time to make sure.
The next job was the right kind of footman. The original footman would have been made from steel rod, but these days an easy solution to a missing one is to make it from a wire coathanger, and I took this option (or rather my helpful husband did, to my specifications). It’s roughly similar to what the wheel would once have had, and works fine.
Initially I had trouble with the wheel tossing off the drive band. I discovered that the axle wasn’t perfectly horizontal, so that the wheel didn’t align perfectly with the whorl and bobbin grooves – always something to check when drive bands won’t stay on. I tried a piece of felt (I didn’t have any leather and we were in lockdown!) under the lower end but it didn’t help. Finally I managed to take the front wheel support post part way out and put it back on a slightly better angle, and all is well now.
Something else that will need attention is the bobbins. The ones I’m currently using are not original. When my friends bought the wheel, it had two bobbins, one of them badly broken. They didn’t know that it would originally have come with only two.
They sent one of them to Mike Keeves to be copied, but the new ones have a problem: they clatter. It’s is not Mike’s fault; he wasn’t sent the flyer to check the fit, which is always a very wise thing to do when getting bobbins made.
The original bobbin was old and battered, and he says “working from it I would have assumed the shaft size as being 8mm.” Later I sent him the flyer to check, and when he got to measure things he found that the sizes are all unusual.
“The flyer shaft diameter is 7.4mm or a shade under 5/16 inch and the thread is the same which does not match usual dies. So that accounts for the noise.”
We have a plan for fixing the clatter, and there is some other work needed. I’ll tell you another time how that goes.
Meanwhile, I’m really enjoying this wheel. It has taken a little while to get used to spinning at such speed, and now that I have, I’m finding I can slow down a bit when I want to and it hardly ever stops or runs backwards. It’s reliable, now that the axle alignment is sorted. And it comes from near Montreal where my mother was born and grew up, so although my family aren’t French-Canadian, I feel an affinity.
There are many signs of its origin in the workshop of Frédéric Bordua and his son Théodore. As we’ve seen, they were making these wheels in bulk, keeping the processes simple and economising on materials. I like the knots in the wood of the drive wheel.
If you look hard at this picture (you might need to click it to enlarge) you’ll see that the section at top left is actually pieced together from two different bits of wood.
In fact the drive wheel is made of some very light wood – I’ve seen it described as “fluffy.” You’d think this might make momentum hard to maintain, but I’m not finding that a problem. (It would have been very welcoming for those borers though!)
Below the wheel, you can see where the slab of wood from which the table was made must have been incomplete. And let’s look closely at one of the spokes:
It has been made from the very outside of a block of wood, and isn’t fully rounded – in fact you can see the original saw marks that were on the block.
Waste not, want not!
I’ve noticed something about the feet, too – two of them look as though they’ve had their toes amputated.
I’m holding up the right front (spinner’s-side) leg to show its flat bottom, and behind it you can see the back leg with the usual Bordua en pointe shape. And here is the left front foot, again showing the back foot behind.
I wondered if the two front legs had initially been made too long? A sideways-tilted drive wheel wouldn’t make for smooth spinning. It would have been a shame just to reject them, and shortening them at the top would have ruined the turnings. Then I noticed a little mark on the right front leg:
Two parallel lines, crossed by two pairs of parallel double lines. Could it mean “Cut some off”? My imagination got to work, and I could almost hear M. Bordua senior saying to his son/apprentice Théodore “Mon fils, you have made these legs too long. You must cut some off at the feet, and be very careful to get the angle right. See, I will mark this one to remind you.”
I’ve since heard of another of these wheels that has similar feet. It’s been pointed out that the wider surface would give more contact with a plain wooden floor, meaning the spinning wheel would be less likely to slide – a practical consideration that hadn’t occurred to me in a carpeted house. So I don’t insist that my fanciful little story is true, but I like it.
Acknowledgement
I owe heartfelt thanks to the people of the CPW Lovers forum on Ravelry, whose knowledge is tremendous and generously shared.
New Zealand Spinning Wheels and their makers 