Lynette Richter and John Thorson will present Drop Spindles at the June 27th regular meeting.
“When you break a drop spindle down into its core components a drop spindle is pretty simple, there is basically two parts. One is the center shaft which is basically what the drop spindle revolves around. The shaft is also used to wrap the thread after a twist has been applied to the thread. The second part is the whorl. The whorl acts as a weight to prevent the thread from drawing back up on itself and kinking up as well as helping the drop spindle continue to spin. The placement of the whorl also can change the characteristics of the drop spindle. When the whorl sits up high the drop spindle can spin faster and can become unbalanced a lot quicker. Modern drop spindles have a hook or notch to the shaft to hold the thread while the drop spindle is spinning thread. When you look back at some historical documents, the hook on top was sometimes replaced with a notch or a simple knot to hold the thread and drop spindle in the proper place.”
– description from www.fromsheeptoshawl.com ‘An Introduction to Drop Spindles’
These examples are from Grizzly Mountain Arts in Prineville, Oregon and look like a fun pattern for the demo. Dimensions are 9 inches in length with a 2 1/2 inch whorl and the weight is under 2 ounces.
The presentation started with a spinning demo. Lynette turned several types of fibers from wool to the Shetland cattle hair shown in these photos.
John made his drop spindles by first turning the underside of the whorl. The board was mounted on his OneWay Woodworm screw held in a 4 jaw chuck with a wooden spacer, at least 3 threads into the wood and then the cuts had to be gentle.
With the spacer John could undercut the back of the whorl a bit and cut in a recess for the chuck jaws.
The whorls could then be turned around and held in the 4 jaw chuck to turn the top side. John used his point tool to add some features and a texturing tool to add a band of texture to the tops of these whorls.
A set of ‘pin jaws’ on the 4 jaw chuck helped in drilling operations but also in turning various beads and other shapes in the spindle rod.
Here John lays out the spacing for the beads and teardrop shape he wants on the end of the spindle.
We talked through these operations during the presentation discussing the tools and techniques used.
These are the ‘top whorl’, ‘bottom whorl’ and Navajo style drop spindles turned for this presentation.
One thing learned during the spinning portion of the presentation is that you need a little ‘tie off’ groove in the spindle shaft so that has been added in these examples.
By: John Thorson On: 06/27/2019
Show And Tell
Lynette Richter: More weed pots
John Thorson: Drop spindles