August | 2015 | Maple Woods Handweaving

I haven’t posted in a couple weeks as progress on the loom cleanup has been slow. Partly I needed a bit of a respite, and partly I had other responsibilities to attend to. I have made some progress, however. I finished up the heddle bars, treadle springs, and started to de-rust the jacks. I did one jack, but it took a couple days of work and I’m not really happy with the results. While mulling that situation over, I ran across a link on Weavolution to this site: http://www.rickswoodshopcreations.co/Miscellaneous/Rust_Removal.htm

For a small investment in equipment, you too can remove rust with minimal effort! I tried this method out on the crank that turns the warp beam.

Following the directions I hooked up the crank to the negative lead of the charger, hooked the positive lead to an old stainless steel food processor blade that I got at our transfer station’s “Swap Shop”, submerged the crank and half of the blade in electrolyte solution, plugged it in and went and did something else for a couple hours.

When I came back, the rust was gone. The electrolysis solution was pretty gunky, as was the food processor blade, but the crank is back to usable metal. If this method works for the jacks it will make cleaning them up so much easier.

The tricky part is that the jacks are almost 36” long. I had to wrack my brains to figure out where I could get a plastic container that would allow me to fully submerge a 36” long object. The longest plastic storage container I could find was more like 35”. Trash cans are not 36” deep. I finally was able to find a long pvc window box liner. I will test out this system on the jacks sometime this week. I’m not one hundred percent sure that the window box liner is watertight, so the test will have to be done in good weather outdoors. There are plenty of smaller pieces of metal to take care of until then.

The most exciting part for me in using the electrolysis (well, in addition to the fact that it’s pretty cool to see it work) is that it frees up the time I had been using to scrub off rust and allows me to do other things. When I bought this loom I had just finished a project on the Tools of the Trade loom, and I haven’t had enough time to start another. I miss weaving. I have already started getting a warp ready for the next project.

The heddles are all clean, all 1,853 of them. As I mentioned before I know some of them will likely have to be discarded, but I wouldn’t expect to need 1,800 anyway. I have also finished cleaning all the metal bits that are still attached to the wood of the loom. In addition to starting to clean the jacks this week I hope to spend some time cleaning the wood. There is old packing tape residue to be removed, as well as general dirt and mildew. I do think I see a light at the end of this tunnel, though!

I feel as though I haven’t made a whole lot of progress this week. Partly this is because I had other things to do besides work on the loom, and partly it is because cleaning the metal heddle bars is just taking longer than I expected. I have 3 more to do. I refined my rust removal technique a bit; I found that if I leave the rust remover on a bit longer after the initial coat it is easier to get the rust off. So now I paint both sides of the bar with rust dissolver and let it sit for 15 minutes or so. In that time the rust dissolver starts to dry up. When I’m ready to really get to work I paint a second coat of rust dissolver (over what’s already there) on the first 8-12 inches of one side of the rod. Then I scrub about 6 inches of that. After scrubbing it can be hard to see the metal since it’s covered with rust-colored goop, so I paint on a little fresh rust dissolver which cleans off the goop and lets me see if I need to scrub any of that part further. When painting the fresh coat on I extend the area I’m painting by another 4 inches or so, and continue working down the length of the rod this way. I’m glad to have worked this out before tackling the jacks.

In addition to cleaning the heddle rods I have also cleaned some of the springs that go under the treadles, and I’ve removed rust from the screws, nuts, and bolts that I removed from the loom to get at the heddles and treadles. I still have to de-rust the remaining springs, miscellaneous nuts and bolts from when the loom was partially disassembled in the 1970s, and the thin metal rods used for tying up the treadles. I found 16 of these metal rods loose in box that are quite extensively rusted, and many, many more in a plastic bag that have far less rust. I’m thinking I’ll start on the lightly rusted ones since I’m unlikely to use all of these tie-up rods at once.

A comparison of cleaned springs with those yet to be cleaned.

I also did a little more cleaning up of metal pieces that are still attached to wood. My grandchildren will be with me all this week, so I don’t expect to be able to get to cleaning the metal jacks until the weekend. For this week I will try and finish the metal-attached-to-wood, and possibly start cleaning up the wood itself.

1210 heddles have been cleaned to date. I think my estimate of 1600 heddles total is too low, but we’ll see.