It's a loom! And a visit from the Loom Fairy.

 Now that I knew the loom was a loom, not an extravagant paperweight, it was time to get serious about setting it up.  There were still some questions (do I want larger heddles?  How will the shed look if the shafts are all the way at the back?  Am I going to need to replace the warping beam?), but they're not going to be answered except by setting everything up and giving it a try.

So I cut off what I'd woven, wound it back to the warping beam, removed the cords from the treadles and lamms, took down the beater, and generally undid everything I'd spent a week doing.  Sadly, it didn't occur to me to take pictures, but it's not very interesting with just a frame sitting there.  Then I started replacing cord with texsolv, and now I understand why it's so popular.  So, more or less in order:

1) Re-hang the shafts.  Since there are no pins for the jacks, I use blocks of 1x2 to hold them in place.  Against all advice, I hung them as far back as possible.  Why?  Because as the shafts move back, the shed in front of the beater gets smaller, and I want to know if it will be usable with eight shafts and the current 10 1/2" heddles.  (The jury is still out on this one as I write.)

2) Hang the lower lamm cord from the center of the jacks between the shafts.

3) Normally, this is where one would thread the heddles and sley the reed.  I don't have any shaft holders, though, and my reed is too short to hang from the frame, so I went straight to tying up the lamms.  This was where I ran into my first problem, though I'd been expecting it.  For whatever reason, the lamms don't have a center hole drilled in them, so I just put a loop of texsolv around them.  This turned out later to have been a mistake.

4)  NOW thread the heddles, sley the reed, and tie up the front.  I normally run the whole bundle over the top of the tie-on rod, then use a surgeon's knot to fasten it.  It's worked well for me, but I've been watching Vavstuga's video basics course, and decided to try their method.  The Loom Fairy was kind enough to give me a piece of the cord they use for their "magic string."  I'll have to work with it some more to have a real opinion... I'll probably do a writeup of how I feel about some of their practices later.  The short version is, my loom is just enough different that the way they do things doesn't entirely work for me.

5)  Do the tie-up.  This is where I ran into some trouble.  My original goal was to do half the Vavstuga way, and half using the "top of the lamms" method.  I did all the TotL tieups (12 cords), and then moved onto the Vavstuga method, and discovered I just don't have good enough access to the bottom of the treadles.  I pushed through and did it, but after a few adjustments I decided it was too much work to get under the treadles and switched everything to the TotL tieup.  On my loom, I can reach to make most of the adjustments without climbing inside of it, which will be critical if I ever have a really wide warp on the loom.

6) Check the shed.  It's pretty good, though it could be better.  The bottom of the shed, where the shuttle rides, is clean on all six treadles, but there are a few treadles where one of the rising shafts need to go a little higher.

And I think that's enough of a wall of text for today.  I'm going to stop here, and write another entry sometime soon about testing it, and maybe trying to fix the not so great shed.