Skip to main content

Troublesome Texel Loom

So, this is the Texel loom I am using this month. I used one of these last year and it seemed to work. Mostly. Except when it didn't.

Sometimes it works fine, which suggests that the mechanism is perfectly capable and has no faults. It can work fine for hundreds of picks. And then sometimes it just stops. Or sometimes it selects the wrong shafts. It's still difficult to know if it's a mechanical fault as I don't fully understand the lifting mechanism and it's difficult to get somebody to sit there doing false weaving while I examine each moving part in detail.

However, I suspect it could potentially be a problem with the computer that directs it. Not sure how to diagnose that though.





So yeah. For some reason this damn interface isn't letting me insert text next to or between my images. Ridiculous. Anyway, you can see how the computer connects to the loom itself. It appears to take feedback from the loom in the form of digital inputs from those two microswitches you see there, which will tell whether the shed is open or closed, depending on which pedal is pressed down.

It should feed digital highs and lows directly to the circuit board accordingly, which cause the transistors to switch power to the solenoids. The solenoids should then select the appropriate shafts.

In theory, but in practice things are going wrong. I don't know why, so I should try to find out whether the problem is at the computer end or the loom end. If it's at the computer end, I have a solution. If it's at the loom end I don't. Yet

Comments

Lottie knitter said…
hello are you still having trouble with the texel key board? as i know someone who could possibly fix it for you, i look after 8 of them :)

Andrew Kieran said…
Alright lottie, if you could have me a contact for this person that'd be great. My email is a.kieran@hw.ac.uk could you drop me a line?

Popular posts from this blog

Tablet Weaving Lesson #1: Backstrap weaving a simple diamond motif

This is the first in a series of video and photo tutorials showing basic to advanced tablet-weaving concepts. These lessons shall each build on the last and hopefully take the viewer from simple diamond patterns up to more complicated double face pattern weaving with finer yarns and eventually onto the heady heights of brocading and other fancy techniques (just as soon as I learn how to do them myself). In this first lesson we'll learn the basic weaving steps involved in weaving a diamond pattern in the backstrap style. This lesson is meant for someone who has purchased a ready-made warp from me. The next lesson shall detail how to design and make this warp oneself. And we begin This is the basic pattern we are making. The woven band is tied to my waist with another strap. I am holding a small stick shuttle in my right hand which contains the weft. In front of me are the cards, each card has 4 warp threads going through it. The gap that you can see is called the

The curse of the faulty rachet-stop + The contractual obligation video post

I got the warp wound on the medium sized loom last week, and threaded and sleyed it this weekend Now. The back beam is held by a ratchet. and the ratchet-stop is a plate of metal which is pulled up from the ratchet-wheel with a handle attached to the main upright. It seems that somewhere along the line of the last couple of weeks i must have bent the plate back a little cos it no longer holds tight against the wheel. i've tried holding it down with a piece of cord wrapped round the beam, but it's not having it and i've had the whole thing come loose while swinging the batten twice already. I've tried to remove the plate but one of the screws is held tight. I'm going to have to take it outside and hammer it flat on the doorstep. This is aggravating On another aggravating note, the shuttle keeps flying out of the race and hitting the wall when i beat from the left hand side on the larger loom and i can't figure out why, cos i haven't changed anything from the

treble-cloth construction

I am currently in the process of designing a triple layered fabric. One layer shall carry conductive warp threads (one out of every three), another layer shall carry conductive weft threads (again, one out of every three) and a third layer shall lay between them and act as an insulator, keeping them apart and preventing unwanted contact between the two conductive layers. Constructing a treble cloth is a compicated process. The way that a treble cloth is woven is that first the face cloth is woven, then the centre cloth is woven, then the back cloth is woven. This is a draft for a treble cloth. The crosses indicate weaving marks for the cloth currently being woven, the dashes are lifts and are used to indicate shafts that are being lifted in the case of layers that are above the layer currently being woven. Blue is back, Red is front, Green is centre (All three layers are plain weave btw) The cloth is constructed like so 1: Back cloth is woven. All red and green marks are lif