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Thursday, January 17, 2013

Rigid Heddle Loom

What do you mean "Rigid Heddle Loom"? I thought this was a technology projects blog?! Well, a few days ago, after dropping off my girlfirend, I came home to find my daughter Chloe building something out of Popsicle sticks and tape. After my initial puzzlement, she told me that she wants to start weaving. She was trying to make a weaving loom.

She and I talked about weaving for a few, then started to browse eBay for a simple beginners loom. After going through many pages, I determined several things: 1) Any weaving loom in the price range that i was thinking (~50$) was only going to buy a toy - not suitable for anything other than learning and 2) a decent loom for her age and skill ability that was able to actually weave something nice was going to be 150-300$.

After putting the kiddos to bed, I started doing research on looms. The history of weaving, companies that made decent looms such as Ashford, Beka, Harrisville, Kromski, and several others. I took the time to analyze several popular designs, took note, and watched a few dozen videos on loom weaving  and loom use on YouTube. 

After sleeping on it, I started designing a 24x18 Rigid Heddle Loom that took the best properties from several designs. I made a few patterns, and started cutting wood for it today. I downloaded and started printed the heddle portion from http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:11374 on my 3d printer. 

Printing some heddles
2 heddles are 7 1/2 inches



The 2 sides of the loom
I'm making good progress on this and expect to be done with it in the next few days. My 3d UV DLP printer is on hold for now. 

2 comments:

  1. I'm all up on your geek blog! this is awesome and I think Chloe will love to a project like this. not surprised that looms are expensive, but since you can basically make anything (MAGIC!) it's all good......I still want my GIR robot *poke poke*

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