The wheel-building progress is stalling a bit - joining the rim proved to be more fiddly than I had hoped and expected, so the wheel itself is not yet all assembled. I'm now testing an alternative method to do the final rim join, and if that works, I'll get to it this afternoon.
If it will not work, I'll probably just take the rest of the day off regarding the wheel and tackle it again tomorrow, with (hopefully) more energy and success!

And for now, it's a bit of desk work to do...

The spinning wheel is progressing well: I finished the bending part of the process this weekend.
Here's a pic of the bending in preparation: in front of me you see the steam box for the wood (not yet filled - it's preheating) and in the foreground the jig for bending my wheel rim around. It might have been even better to cut the jig with a slightly smaller radius than required for the final wheel, because bent wood will spring back a certain degree, but it's working like that as well.


So today I can start putting the wheel together. That means glueing the rim in one part, sawing the spokes to final length and then fitting the rim around the spokes. And then the "only" bit of work left is to put the wheel onto the stand, align the spindle and spindle holders and put them in as well. But first the wheel.

This, by the way, was the contraption steaming the second half of the long strip to be bent:



And now I'm off to the workshop again!

Yesterday was a public holiday in Germany (hence the blog silence) which I had totally forgotten about and was only reminded Wednesday afternoon (hence the unannouncedness of the blog silence).

I spent the day in the most wonderful if exhausting way. It started with a little stroll through the garden and a bit of weeding in the morning sun, then a nice breakfast together with the most patient of all husbands and a friend (and no, that was not the exhausting part). After this, the friend and me and our upstairs neighbour all found ourselves in the basement - just the thing to do when there's lovely early summer weather outside - and did various woodworking stuff. Planing, mortise-cutting, drilling, sawing, neatening... which meant that I made very, very good progress on the spinning wheel, in lovely company and while lots of fun were being had.

And the work culminated in me successfully steam-bending the first of the wheel rim parts around the completed form, with some help from our friend (who made the steaming box and has done steam-bending before). Now the next part for the wheel rim is in the water, soaking to be bent during the weekend, and then, soon, it will be time to put all things together and find out whether it works as well as intended...

Since I've been working with tools now, it's very fitting that Gillian shared this lovely bit of knowledge with me: the publication of the Maestermyr tool chest is available online. It's the full publication from the 1980s, in English, so it includes the full catalogue.

The site it's hosted on is some kind of e-library, though I could not figure out whether it's a private or an institutional one.

If you would prefer today to test your knowledge on experimental archaeology, you can go here and try to solve a crossword puzzle about the topic. I did not manage to do it without some cheating, but my excuse is that I'm not in the UK or US and thus do not know the masters there... and I'm a textile person, anyways. Best excuse ever.

Speaking of textile person: the cross-and-post tabletweaving thingie is finished. It could do with some more neatening at a few places, but it's done, it's functional, and it comes fully apart. Yay. Plus I now know how to do mortises. This was the mortise-practice-piece for the spinning wheel parts that need mortises, after all.

Here's the thingie - the weave is just clamped to the posts for now, but I will wind it on properly for working with it.






The wheel is also coming along, slowly but steadily - on today's agenda is to saw and construct the jig for the wheel rim and the jig for drilling the leg holes for the stand.

I spent a few hours in the workshop yesterday, having a lot of fun. It's been ages since I last used powered tools extensively, and I still never used them as much as this time around. I can absolutely appreciate the beauty and the special feeling that comes with doing everything the slow way and by hand, but I'd never build a wheel in that way.

And now I'll finish my tea and bumble off to the workshop again, for a little intermezzo: the tablet-weaving "loom" is on today's agenda. And maybe I'll even remember to take some pictures...

Finally, all things necessary have come together: The wood that I need, the machines and tools that I need, and the lovely upstairs neighbour with time on his hands to show me how to use the machines. So on the weekend, I started work on the new wool wheel.

As German strategist von Moltke once said, "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy" - I have already made some changes to the plan that I drew in meticulous work. The board that will carry all the rest of the wheel has gotten somewhat slimmer (so that it could fit into the planing machine), and it's not all even (though that does not bother me a bit), and it's about 5 cm shorter than intended originally. But all that is no big deal, since the plan was more or less drawn after a Psalter illumination and part of the plan was to adjust as necessary.

In addition to the wheel, and in some way also to practice some of the procedures, I am also planning to build a crossbar-and-post tablet weaving "loom", which means a run to the hardware store today. And the loom will come in very, very handy for my latest weaving project which will also travel with me to the RGZM in two weeks. Fortunately, the thing is an utterly simple affair... rendered even simpler by my planning on how to build it.

Yesterday saw me working on a few open questions at once in the library in Bamberg, including pondering a few spinning wheel questions. There's a lot of speculation abounding in regard to the output possible on a hand-spindle, on a Great Wheel and on a modern treadled flyer spinning wheel. There are also quite a few (modern) depictions, descriptions and interpretations of the Great Wheel that do not at all fit in with the image I have in mind of that Wheel: a specialised, highly productive tool for the textile industry, with some very specific caveats and disadvantages, but also with a significantly higher rate of output than the spindle.

All these ponderings are not only in connection with the wheel project - a part of them will also find a little space in the presentation for the conference in Vienna. And all this research is finally solving a few questions I had for a long time.

One is yet unsolved, though. How do I attach the wheel rim to the spokes (or vice versa)? I don't want it all to wobble or fall apart, but I also do not want to risk damage when the wood deforms a little due to changing conditions. Input and speculation (or description of how your Great Wheel, should you have one, keeps its rim and spokes together) is very welcome.