Swinging beaters, words of praise and birds that sing!

Now that I am back in the studio, I can really make up for lost time! I found an image of the completed piece I posted yesterday. In this image the piece is being sewn to the backing and then it will be installed in a custom frame. You can see that the finished piece has the logo (inside the house) of the non-profit foundation that commissioned this artwork for their retiring executive director. The singing bird is a symbolic way of honoring this woman's work for the organization, a work of joy!

I had a call from a weaver who is refinishing a used loom. Her questions concerned the mounting of the beater, which by the way is a very SWEET feature of the Macomber Loom. The beater upright sits on a bolt which is screwed into a small cast iron piece. The small cast iron piece is screw mounted to the base of the loom.

You can adjust the height of the beater by selecting which slot to rest upon the bolt. The other adjustment is that you can swing this small cast iron part forward and backward (might need to loosen the bolt attachment).

When you swing this small cast iron part, it will adjust how close the beater sits against the castle. Often if the floor is not level, this will affect the way the beater rest against the castle upright, causing one side of the beater to hit and another to be a slight distant away. By fine tuning the beater with this small cast part, you can accommodate for any imbalance.

Your warp should rest comfortably on the beater race (the straight horizontal bar). By raising or lowering the height of the beater and fine tuning the left/right position, you can get it perfect!

And finally words from a weaver who has a Macomber Air Dobby System
"I continue to marvel that the system works so well.  My back pain is a memory.  I timed a chenille scarf last week and could weave 90" scarf in exactly one hour.  I think that is probably substantially faster than foot treadling a scarf of the same size.  Yea."

Happy weaving! Sarah