i made a 'walking wheel' style or charka wheel.... i flipped a cheap bike over, took off the rear wheel, stuck a long double pointed knitting needle in the peg holes, popped a sewing machine bobbin on the needle with tape for friction to act as the whorl, took the tube off the front tire, connected a waxed band of yarn from the wheel to the sewing bobbin and i had a 50 to 1 spin ratio which couldnt be more perfect for the dyed cotton yarn i want to make! your spinning videos helped me tremendously, THANK YOU. Now i want to add a fly-bobbin and a bigger whorl to slow it down...
The spinning wheel is a surprisingly modern piece of technology - and it's tightly entwined (pun intended!) in our social history from the Renaissance to the present. It wasn't invented until about the tenth century, in India, where an ancient type, the charkha, is still in use today. It has neither treadle nor flyer, and is simply a drop spindle set on its side driven by a hand-turned wheel and pulley. It could make only long-draw yarns, and therefore produced only soft fuzzy wool, suitable for knitting or nålebinding. It could not make a uniform warp thread for weaving, so weaving still required the drop spindle. The Great Wheels and Walking Wheels that you see are charkhu scaled up. The flyer wasn't added until the sixteenth century. Leonardo may have invented it - one of his notebooks is the first reliable attestation - but he attributed it to a citizen of Braunschweig. The treadle was added at the same time. WIthout a flyer, treadle power is pretty useless. The wheel was still single-driven, much like your example, making it difficult to produce a uniform thread and continuing to require a long draw, alternating drafting and winding. The big advantage to treadle and flyer was that it sped up the process, rather than improving the quality of yarn or the variety that could be produced. Producing a greater volume of soft yarn may be what gave rise to knitting. It's much faster than nålebinding, which didn't mean much when the spinning required ten times the number of hours that the nålebinding did, but would have made quite a difference once flyer-and-bobbin were in play. In any case, the speedup led to a much better supply of clothing - and hence a better supply of hempen rags, which were raw material for paper, without which Gutenberg and those who followed could not have gone into the industrial-scale production of the printed word. (Wood-pulp paper was a much later invention.) Arguably, it was the spinning wheel as much as the printing press that gave rise to universal literacy. A wheel that could spin flax (or cotton - which was by the 18th century coming from the New World in increased quantities) didn't come along until the invention of the double drive, where both bobbin and flyer were powered, with the size ratio of the pulleys determining the twist of the yarn. This invention is what led to our picture of a woman seated at a spinning wheel, with a distaff full of flax, winding a yarn of fine linen. But that picture lasted for a few decades at most. A rapid series of innovations toppled it: the invention of double rollers, which could draft more uniformly than fingers; of the ginning machine, enabling the production of worsted; and of the water frame, which drove the final nail in the coffin of hand spinning as a means of industrial-scale production, Gandhi's vision for India notwithstanding. By 1800, the production of fabrics had in large measure moved from the farmhouse to the mill. With it came the "mill girls." A woman could now, more or less respectably, earn a living outside the home. Those newly-independent women of the mills in turn triggered a social revolution. The drive for woman suffrage, and for the abolition of slavery, came out of the mill towns, be they Birmingham and Manchester in England, or Seneca Falls and Lowell in the US. Moreover, the mechanization of weaving allowed the designers of looms to experiment with new fabrics. Elaborate tapestries could be produced without needing weavers to work for months weaving on a frame loom - instead, heddles could be controlled individually, and weft yarns swapped in and out, using Jacquard's punched cards - and we all know the history where Jacquard's clockwork traces forward into our computer revolution. Truly, that little idea of the concentric shafts for flyer and bobbin changed the world!
Thank you!!! I have always wanted a spinning wheel to buy one is Very pricey. I learned a sew when I about 10 years old on a treadle sewing machine (you old singer) and it is setting I my living room with a lamp Not anymore. I also knit my own sweaters. THANK YOU
Enjoyed your videos. I watched you using your machine before seeing how it was made. LOL. Would love to see a video of setting up a pottery table using the treadle base.
Thank you for sharing this. The pipe for the flyer I understand I think. What I’m confused about how to attach the spike. Is the pipe and the spike individual centered and aligned to the wood?
Bwa ha ha ha! I'm honored at the comparison. Short answer is the camera battery died while the charger was misplaced so we filmed this one on a cell phone. JB
