A Loom-Shaped Object?

 From the beginning, there were some oddities in this loom, but I mostly put them down to it having been disassembled and sitting for a long time.  And the price was right, so I figured some repairs were going to be necessary regardless.

Once I got it assembled, there were three things that stood out, and the more I looked, the less I believed it had ever been used as a loom.  After getting it working, I'm even more convinced.

First, the cloth beam had ratchet teeth, but they point the wrong way for the feed direction of the apron, and there's no pawl to catch them.  That's easy enough to fix:  just turn the apron around and add a wood or metal pawl.  This could have been a repair by someone who didn't quite know what they were doing at some point in the past.

The second obvious issue was that there's a huge crack in the warping beam.  That's a little more of a problem, but it's massive enough that the crack shouldn't be an immediate problem.  If it does become a serious problem I'll need to replace the beam, but that's an issue for another day.  Again, this could have happened while it was in storage, so nothing earth-shattering.

The third, and the one that seems weirdest to me, is that there was no way to keep the beater parallel to the fell of the fabric.  It just rests on two tilted beams, which means that every time I used it, it slipped around.  It was ok before dressing the loom, but as soon as there was some drag it shifted quite a bit.  It's easy to fix, but I really can't see how it would ever have been used this way.

There are other things, like the holes in the lamms and treadles being rough and not worn, that also suggest that if it was used, it wasn't used much.  My feeling at this point is that it was built by an extremely talented joiner who was copying a design he didn't really understand.

So the real question became, "Can I make it work?"  At this point, I just wanted to see if it could function:  all these problems are fixable with some amount of effort, but if there was more I hadn't found out about yet, there might yet be a deal-breaker of a problem.

Tune in next time for setting it up and testing it!



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