Can this be a New Zealand wheel?

Here is another post co-authored with Shan Wong. Practically all the photos will enlarge helpfully if you click on them.

When Shan sent me this picture she’d received, my first thought (after “Wow!”) was “That must surely be from Norway.” The wheel had been owned by a spinner who lived in Wanganui and then New Plymouth, but there was no information about its origin. It was now in Northland and for sale.

I knew how to describe it, thanks to regular reading of the Antique Spinning Wheels forum on Ravelry. It’s a super-slanty, a design that seems to have originated in Norway. This means it slants so steeply that the two legs on the right are attached in the end of the table, not in the bottom. Here is an example of a super-slanty made in Norway about 1850.

But more than that, and much rarer, it’s also a broken-table wheel – the table is in two parts. One end is super-slanty but the other end (holding the flyer assembly) is horizontal. There’s a “break” between the two parts and they are joined with two wooden pillars. Here is one, another Norwegian from the mid 1800s.

Shan (with perhaps just a little encouragement from me) eventually bought the wheel. We were fascinated by its origin. Certain features were reminding us strongly of a New Zealand maker, Reg Rudhall of Christchurch, who along with his friends James Colthart and Sidney Wing was making wheels in Christchurch in the 1960s.  We wondered whether perhaps he had refurbished a partial or damaged Norwegian broken-table super-slanty, making new parts to replace missing ones? Or had he started from scratch, presumably with a Norwegian example to copy?

Below is another photo of the wheel, with apologies for the sun problem. (Please ignore the silvery metal piece securing the front end of the axle – it’s a fix by Shan for a missing part – more on that later.) This wheel is not, by the way, as big as one might think – the drive wheel is 53cm in diameter and its overall height, at 82cm, is 5cm less than a Rappard Mitzi.

Following it is a Rudhall wheel. Their overall shapes are different of course, and Rudhall varied his wheels a bit, but the one pictured is fairly typical.

We can see a few common features of the two wheels:
• Most obvious is the bobbin-holder, secured to the table – not the way Norwegian spinners stored their bobbins! Such a bobbin-holder, with its bobbins stacked vertically, is either present or has left traces (a hole and often some fittings) on every horizontal Rudhall wheel I know of. (Sidney Wing also attached bobbin-holders to his double-table wheels this way but his bobbins are lined up side by side.)
• The brass or copper bindings firming up the ends of the front treadle bar are a diagnostic feature of Rudhall wheels.
• Look at the shape of those treadles. Here is a better view of a known Rudhall one on the left and our mystery wheel’s on the right.

It’s not just the shape and the way the front ends are set on top of the treadle bar. See the chip carving along the back edge of each? It’s a feature too on the edges of the upper and lower tables of many Rudhall double-table wheels and on the mystery wheel:

Now, here’s a fairly typical Norwegian flyer assembly from the 1960s.

It belongs to my Husfliden wheel, with its lovely wooden tension screw. Here’s the flyer assembly of our mystery.

The 3-piece flyer, with its shaped crosspiece and copper bindings on the arms, is pure Rudhall. Of course a flyer may be a replacement for a missing part of an older wheel, so let’s look at the fittings. They are metal – the metal post that fits through the table is secured underneath by a round metal nut and washer, and the tension screw, which can be seen in the photo below, is metal. (The hole on the right is where the bobbin holder fits.) The adjustment knob has Rudhall’s favourite copper binding!
But perhaps the most convincing Rudhall feature is a small but critical one: it’s the way the axle is secured. The Rudhall wheel below is an example of his typical enclosure of the axle in an oblong metal casing with a round hole through it, set into the post and butting up against a metal plate in the centre of the hub.

Here is our super-slanty’s fitting – the same metal plate on an almost identically shaped hub, and the little oblong metal casing holding the axle in place. (As we saw earlier, the casing is has been lost from the other side and Shan has had to improvise.)
Here it’s set into the slanted wheel post and secured with a shaped wooden peg, very like (except for being on the end of a metal screw) the peg you can just see in the third photo above, of the Norwegian broken table-wheel. On Rudhall’s regular horizontal wheels with their upright wheel posts he just secured it with a further strip of brass.

The peg is just one example of the stylistic features of Norwegian super-slanties which are rather convincingly reproduced in this wheel. Another is the wooden medallions that decorate places where we might otherwise see the end of a post or screw. You can see five of them here:

Four cover whatever is securing the ends of the two short pillars that join the two sections of table, and the fifth one is over the end of a leg. The Norwegian broken-table wheel that we saw above has several such medallions too.

The overall appearance of our mystery wheel is very much in the tradition of this type of Norwegian wheels, with its half-spokes and elaborate turning on legs and wheel posts. Our maker has conveyed the general look and feel while using his own methods to create many of the vital working details.

So here’s our theory – it can’t be absolutely proved, unless some reader with first-hand knowledge kindly gets in touch  and tells the actual story. We believe that at some point in his career Reg Rudhall saw a wheel very, very similar to the broken-table on in the third picture above. (Perhaps he just saw photos of one, but they must have been excellent photos!) He was inspired to make one like it, rose to the challenge and created a wheel that not only looks wonderful, but as Shan and I can both confirm, spins beautifully.

With many thanks to Rosemary Burnby in New Zealand and to Mona (Mono) in Norway for permission to use their photographs, and to the many people who have over the years contributed pictures for the info website and the book and our often-consulted files!