Beautiful! I have the Baby Brother drum carder. I use it to make art batts. Also, is that Grace Shalom Hopkins in this video? I know she has made videos for you before.
I guess you can but it is designed to crank it for cleaning or when adjusting drums. It is not easy like a hand carder to crank so I wouldn't plan on cranking it for a long period of time.
Is it normal to have that much fibre left on the intake drum? Wondering if that's a difference between motorized and hand-cranked carder? Brother hand crank seems to go straight in.
It varies on the fiber that is being fed in. There is a few things that you could try for that: You could try hand painting the fiber directly onto the large drum and we have some RU-vid videos that help explain that technique. Fiber is being fed into the drum carder in pieces that are too thick…….make sure they are very thin bits, thin enough to read the newspaper through. Licker in is too close or to far away from the big drum. Fine fiber naturally tends to build up on the licker in somewhat……some fibers build up more than others…..let it build up and keep carding, just leave the fiberon the licker in and see if it helps. The licker in is meant to transfer the fiber to the big drum as well as take out nepps, second cuts, etc. If the fiber you are working with is free of the “junk” you don’t want in the batt anyway then this is an option. You can clean it off the licker in later and add it directly to the big drum Tease the fiber very well. Don't hold back on the fiber as it is feeding into the carder. If the humidity is very low, try spritzing the fiber with a weak solution of water & fabric softener to reduce static electricity.
