A Gift from a Friend

A very sweet lady who lives in Massachusetts, whom I only worked with for one year, but with whom I'm clearly a kindred spirit, sent me an antique spinning wheel she no longer wanted.

I'm beside myself with joy. It's gorgeous. It's mostly intact and entire. It was made by Silas Barnum.

It's missing a footman, which is a stick that joins the treadle to the wheel and allows me to use my foot to spin the wheel. I tied on a piece of twine temporarily.

 

It also has a broken bobbin, which is more of an issue -- the bobbin is chipped, to be precise. A little chip is no big deal. You can see where the bobbin was repaired before.

See the repair at the top of the bobbin.

But these chips are bigger, and the drive band (like a belt on a machine) will slip off this bobbin, causing the wheel to be useless for spinning.

 

I have that white yarn tied on because it's missing a leather bearing on one end, that the bobbin assembly is attached to.

The leather bearing is the black shape around that orifice. It passes through the wooden maiden,
and you can see its end on the other side, with a small wooden pin through it to hold it in place.

On the other end of the bobbin assembly, this maiden should also have a leather bearing passing through it.
It's missing, so I passed yarn through to hold the metal bobbin up.
Adam will make me a leather bearing when I get back home.

The bobbin assembly was wrongly attached to the maiden, the large wheel was put on backwards, thus making the treadle's position not make sense.

The funny u-shaped piece with metal hooks is called the flyer.
 It spins around very fast when the wheel is going because it's attached to the whorl, which is the 3-disc piece on the left.
The bobbin is the wooden post running between the flyer arms.
It spins independently of the flyer.

Some of the little hooks are missing, but there are enough for it to work fine.

None of these issues is a deal-breaker, and we will get the wheel useful again. I want to learn how to do the simple wood-working to repair the bobbin, getting rid of all those chips.

The metal hook that attaches the footman to the treadle

On the left (above) you see the tension adjuster -- that handle actually runs through the mother-of-all (the entire bobbin/maidens assembly) like a screw, and turning it moves the mother-of-all forward or backward in relation to the wheel, tightening or loosening the drive band.
The drive band is another thing I need to make. It's a long piece of cotton yarn, joined smoothly in a long loop. It winds around the bobbin, around the wheel, around the whorl, and around the wheel again -- it's the belt.

This is the treadle, much used and so essential. It attaches to the legs with pins.
My dear son Peter, who drove from Boston to West Virginia, stopped by the home of my Massachusetts friend and brought the spinning wheel to me. Dearest Huggy (her grandmama nickname) -- thank you, thank you!! I hope you know how wonderful this is to me! I can't wait to get her (for she is certainly a she) home.