susanhaggerty

What I’m Doing on My Summer Vacation

I’ve spent the last year living a life-long dream. As a teenager I decided I wanted a loom (I don’t even remember why). At that age I couldn’t afford a floor loom, but I could purchase a small rigid heddle loom to play with. I used it on occasion, but it was never really what I wanted. I experimented with weaving in different ways over the years: basketry, jury-rigging a backstrap loom out of scraps of wood, and teaching my children to weave on cardboard looms with tapestry needles. The time never seemed right to make the big purchase of a floor loom. Late last spring I happened across a 4-shaft floor loom for sale on eBay. The price was surprising low and, other than needing a little cleanup, it was in working condition. I bought it and have been weaving with it for the last year. I try to spend a little time weaving every day. I’m loving the contemplative rhythm of weaving.

While I love my little 4-shaft Tools of the Trade loom, I realized early on that I would also eventually like to use an 8-shaft loom. I still have a lot of exploring to do with the 4-shaft loom, but there are even more design possibilities with an 8-shaft. With this in mind I have been keeping an eye out for looms on eBay, Craig’s List, and various other sites where used fiber arts equipment is sold. It can be tricky to find looms since most sellers don’t want to ship, so one is limited to buying from loom owners in the vicinity. Even used looms can be pretty pricey. A few weeks ago I noticed an 8-shaft loom for sale in my state. The price was very right, but the ad mentioned that parts of the loom were rusted (the reed and the heddles). I contacted the seller to get more information and make sure that all the loom’s pieces were in her possession since she had taken the loom apart for transport several years ago. The loom had been living in her basement. Long story short I went ahead and bought the loom, and now am facing the lengthy project of cleaning it up and making it usable once more.

We had to take the loom apart even further to get it from the owner’s basement to the U-Haul van we picked it up in. It now resides, in pieces, in a spare bedroom while I work on cleaning it up.

I started cleanup with the lamms, slats of wood that interface between the treadles and the jack mechanism that lifts the shafts. Each lamm has twelve small eyebolts, all of which were rusted.

In fact, there is a thin layer of rust on every metal part of the loom. My plan is to first remove the rust, second clean up the wood, and when everything is clean and shiny put the loom back together. For the metal that is attached to wood I am spraying the metal with WD-40 and scrubbing with steel wool. I am concerned about using anything more caustic than the WD-40 against the wood.

After getting the rust off the lamms, I started on the harnesses. They only have a couple eyebolts but the side pieces are metal. There’s more metal on the harnesses than on the lamms, but it’s easier to get at and cleans up faster. I completed removing rust from the harnesses today. Now there are various wooden pieces with bolts or small metal pieces attached that need cleaning.

As the Craig’s List ad mentioned, the heddles are also rusted. My initial decision was to discard and replace them, since heddles are easily obtained, but then I checked the cost of replacing them and decided cleaning them wouldn’t be all that hard. I am soaking batches of heddles in Coca Cola and polishing them with steel wool and a little WD-40. While I clean them I’m also making sure they’re all oriented the same way (the eye in a heddle is tilted toward one side, so they are right or left-handed), and counting them. There were heddles on the loom and heddles in a shoebox. The current clean heddle count is 700.