The Alien Leader's Blog

So checking back, my last update was in July!  It’s not that I’ve not had anything to report – I’ve just been run a little ragged with, well, life really.  Naturally, the little one has been keeping me on my toes pretty constantly.  I am astounded on a daily basis by how quickly she picks things up (figuratively and literally), and frequently more than a little terrified at how efficient toddling is at getting from safe places to places I really don’t want her going.

Okay, I’ll stop wittering about my baby. Promise! For now, anyway… On to spinning stuff:

Aside from keeping up with orders, I’ve been tinkering with some drop spindle stuff.  I’ve had some ideas in mind about where to take the drop spindle line next, and was starting to get serious about some of them toward the end of summer. Then the Associated Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers Summer School (summer school from now on I think) happened. I had a stand at the summer school market place over the final weekend, and was delivered a challenge by one of the attendees.  The conversation ran approximately like this:

Attendee: “Wow, those Modular Drop Spindles look cool.  What does the lightest configuration weigh?”

Me: “Well, while that varies depending on the wood, I find that they’re generally around 30g without the bobbin.”

Attendee: “Bobbin?”

Me: “Uhm, yeah. Bobbins…” drops off merino/silk personal project and clips on rather less nice demo project bobbin.

Still Me: “That way I can let you have a shot without handing over my own stash! Also helps when I get bored and fancy a change for a while.”

Attendee: “Oh, cool. Love the idea. Only thing is – I’m a lace spinner. Look at this one I’ve bought today. It weighs 7g*!” Hands over tiny, beautiful wooden spindle. “I do go though them though, they tend to break if they drop.”

* I think she said 7g, never had a good head for remembering numbers though.

Me: “Hmm… with some polycarbonate and carbon-fibre materials, I bet I could make something lighter, stronger and modular at the same time.” eyes glaze over in an engineering fuge.

Attendee: “That would be great… 5g or under would be amazing.  There’s a challenge for you!”

Me: “Challenge accepted!”

I’ve been kind of weight obsessed  since then.  In a healthy, engineering type sense, of course.  After really quite a bit of tinkering, fiddling and generally playing around with different materials, I managed to produce the new MDS4 ultra-light modular drop spindle range:

As with its big brother (sister? Okay, older sibling then!) it’s fully modular, so can be reconfigured as top or bottom whorl, has interchangeable whorls and magnetically locking bobbins. In its lightest configuration so far it weighs in at 5g – so I’d say: mission complete there!

That said, of course, I’m certain that I can push the design even further and achieve even lower weights if needed. So far I’ve managed to achieve all the target weights using a 55mm diameter whorl, which gives really excellent spin performance, despite the weight. However, I have some ideas which involve changing the basic design pattern (still compatible with the MDS4 range, naturally) to get whorls which weigh even less. And that’s before I get stuck in with aerofoil profiles and other exotica which could push the design to new extremes.

All that leads me to a question which, not being a lace-spinner, I’m unable to answer myself: What’s the minimum useful weight for a drop spindle? In principle there’s nothing stopping us having a spindle which floats completely weightless, but would that be useful for anything other than turning heads?  Having just written that sentence, I now have an image of a group of spinners all drafting up with the spindle hovering above their heads.  As I say, an attention grabber, but useful?  I doubt it.

In all seriousness though – I’d really like to hear what you think would be a useful minimum weight.  Given that I don’t spin lace, there’s a good chance that helpful posters will be asked to help with testing (read: given prototypes to try out/play with/keep). If you’re interested, do get in touch.

Hmm… I just can’t stop thinking about that hovering spindle now.  Mostly as an engineering problem. I’m not sure I’d ever need it myself… oooooooh, I’ve just realised where I have some materials that I can test this out quickly! Gotta go…

Until next time, happy spinning.

Those of you who went to WoolFest will have noticed that I did in fact get the spinner working in time for the show.  That was a big relief.  I would have been really disappointed if I hadn’t.  True to form, I made my life as difficult as possible in the run-up to the show:  The design changes were mostly cosmetic, but pretty sweeping for all that.  The day before we packed up to leave, I rebuilt almost the entire thing from scratch.  That was a long day, but worth it I think.

As you can see, I ditched the big ring at the front.  That was a strange design idea.  I’m not entirely sure why I kept it in for so long.  It was originally designed to be the front piece of the ‘cage-flyer’, which had 6 arms rather than the usual 2.  It (would have) looked something like:

The idea was that it would form something of a self-supporting structure for running up to very high speeds.  Unfortunately, made out of hardwood as it was, it weighted approximately 3.5 metric tonnes.  Well, okay that’s a pretty massive exaggeration, but you get the idea: it was heavy.  All that extra weight meant that it needed a huge motor to get it running.  And that eats power.  While it’s not directly a show-stopper, I’d rather have it delicately sipping energy.  Especially so that it can have a reasonable battery life.

Perhaps I’ll revisit that at some point with some rather more high-tech materials. Especially as I know there are some speed-demons out there who would love an ultra-high-speed unit.

Thinking back to WoolFest, the modular drop spindles were unexpectedly popular.  I was pretty sure I’d taken plenty of stock with me.  It turns out not.  Not even close in fact, a good thing, of course, but a bit surprising nevertheless.  I’m really rather pleased by the positive reception they got.  At the back of my mind was the nagging doubt that ‘real spinners’ would take a look at them and say: “Really, though?  But why?  What a stupid idea…” I mean, I thought they were pretty cool, and that the bobbins were a pretty useful trick. But I’d have to think that, wouldn’t I. My idea after all, I’m bound to like it. So thanks to everyone who stopped by the stand and said nice things about them. Much appreciated.

So where next? Well that would be telling! Oh, okay then… I have a few things in the pipeline: a proper battery module for the spinner; a lazy-kate which you can add bobbin units to, so that it’s always exactly the size that you need; a ball-winder/swift type gadget; and a motorised measuring skein winder.  I’m also knocking around some ideas about renewable energy sources for the spinner (wind-winder anyone?), and some other stuff that’s probably a bit to silly to write about just now.

Well, until next time: happy spinning.

Well, okay, not the actual finish in any meaningful sense.  But Woolfest is coming up, and I’ve already said to people that I will be showing the new spinner there.  And taking orders for it too, hopefully!  But certainly showing it.  So we’re a couple of weeks out, and I’m in the middle of a mad dash to get everything done.

There’s the spinner prototype itself. Last week I made a couple of fairly large design changes, because there were a couple of details that just weren’t ‘right’. In fairness, they worked well enough, just not exactly how I wanted. So they were changed. I’m finalising the details of it this weekend, and it will be working by Woolfest. I might not, but it will!

In to the mix, there’s the Modular Drop Spindles. I’m trying to build up a bit of stock of them for Woolfest, which is getting there. So barring disaster there should be plenty of spindles for you to pick up and play with if you happen by Cockermouth on the 24th and 25th of June.  If you can make it, that would be a good time to go: as ever I’m giving a 10% discount on everything for the show.

Aside from all that, as if it wasn’t enough – there’s the flyers/handouts/information leaflet things (you can tell I’ve given my marketing loads of forethought as usual!)  They will get done, though.  I’ve just got to get a final build of the spinner prototype to photograph for it, then it will get done. Loads of time… really!

To cap it all off (in the manner of the icing, cherry, candles and chocolate sprinkles on the cake) darling daughter is entering an exciting new stage of mobility. Crawling happens at alarming (possibly illegal) speeds, and was learned a couple of days after her first (supported) steps. She’s now charging around the place exploring everything. Yesterday I turned round from removing the bottom couple of rungs on the built in ladder in her bedroom to find her duelling herself with my screwdrivers.  The duelling was topped of with her new astonishing Dr Horrible/pirate captain/swashbuckler cackle. It would be hillarious if it wasn’t so unsettling!

Well, back to the grind-stone for me. A small software update to the spinner still stands between me and dinner.

Until next time: happy spinning.

It’s been a somewhat interesting week at Almost Alien.  Interesting in the ‘may you live in interesting times’ sense, mostly.  Still, I’ve not been bored, so that’s something.  Also, much of the strife has lead directly to a pretty substantial improvement in the Alien Spinner 2 project.  So that’s something too.

Part of the inspiration for this post was a pod-cast I listened to the other day, by Mr Stephen Fry.  I’m new to his podgramme series, and so far haven’t been disapointed.  I find them unsurprisingly both funny and interesting, usually at the same time.  The most recent one I’ve listened to was about language – how we learn it (as infants), how we use (and abuse) it, how we enjoy it, and indeed how language evolves.  On that last point, he spoke out quite vehemently against the self-appointed language police, who seem to make it their mission to rail against what they see as the misuse of language – all too common technical errors such as ’10 items of less’, and so forth.

This was somewhat to my horror: I am on occasion exactly such a person.  Don’t get me wrong, I’d never go round correcting signs and so forth, that’s just vandalism, however well indended.  Nevertheless, there are some such things which can get me a little irate.  New spellings, are a particular gripe of mine.  Top of the list has to be spelt, which of course, should be spelled: spelled.  Yikes, that’s an odd looking sentence!  Other particularly irksome spellings are the dwarf/dwarves, and roofs/rooves.  The latter at least seems to have fallen out of most dictionaries, so I expect I’m just going to have to take that one on the chin.  It’s good to be wrong every now an then.  At any rate, I’m trying to get over it, after all most natural linguistic horrors are perfectly intelligible.  It’s also, as Mr Fry points out quite right and proper that a language should evolve.  I can’t see myself going round speaking old english, or even Elizabethan English, for that matter.

That all said, I do have an excuse, of sorts.  As a software engineer (by training at least), I often use very specialised languages (programming languages, naturally) and the usage of those needs to be extremely precise.  It simply won’t do to play fast-and-loose with the rules, as one might with natural (human) languages.  These languages do evolve too, though usually very slowly, and always in a controlled fashion. Well, except in the wonderful world of embedded systems.

The developers of the compiler (software for turning programming languages into computer instructions) I use for the computers my spinner for some bizzare reason have ‘decided’ to play fast and loose with the language specification.  They recently ‘upgraded’ the compiler and in so doing, changed the actual language in subtle and strange ways.  I won’t go into the technical details of what they’ve done, it’s not really interesting to many people who aren’t me.  But the upshot of it is that perfectly correct programs suddenly generate loads of errors.  Worse than that, changing the optimisation levels (a technical thing which makes the end result go faster) changes the grammar of the language.  It shouldn’t.  Not ever.  That’s analagous to saying that if you want to summarise something written in English, you can, but you must only use French to do so.  The strange decisions of that company have had me going an exciting shade of purple (apparently) and screaming “You illegitimate sons of goat prostitutes!” at my computer.  That helped. That always helps.

Once the rage subsided, I took the calm calculated decision to throw the whole damned thing out and go shopping for a new compiler.  Pleasingly this lead me almost directly to some new development systems.  Much better ones, and not just for my sanity.  The new system will give the Alien Spinner a nice colour display; support for microSD memory cards, which I think I’ll use for storing settings and yardage/TPI data for individual projects; and even MP3 output.  I’m not quite sure why I’d want MP3 support, but I’ve got it, so I may just have to think of a way to use it!

To finish up, inspired once more by Mr Fry, I thought I’d laugh at myself a little. While talking about children learning languages, he offered the opinion that it’s preposterous to imagine a child being taught language by a parent saying things like:”these are the stairs, which we use to get to another level of a building”.  As ludicrous as being taught how to drive a car by having the alternator explained to you.  This had me chuckling to myself for two reasons: the first takes me back to my first driving lesson in which my Dad, for reasons passing understanding, began with – “the clutch operates like…”.  To be fair, I didn’t crash.  The more recent event, just a few days ago, had me explaining stairs to my daugther, in almost exactly the described way.  Poor girl.  She’s clearly doomed.

Ah well, back to the grind-stone.

Until next time, happy spinning.

This week I’m going to take a little step back from wittering about what I’m building at the moment, so if you’re looking for an update on the new spinner, look away now!  Okay, after this paragraph – in which I’ll say: it’s in progress; I’m working on the new control software for the new drive system, and tidying up the rest of the code to make it easier to update for the next time.  Okay, now the update junkies can look away.

Right, now they’re gone, I can get the next bit off my chest.  A wee while ago I read an article called ‘accidental innovation’ which got me thinking.   The basic idea was that you can’t meaningfully sit down and think: “Right, let’s innovate.”  At least, if you do, what you get is something pretty empty, at best a small step-change over existing systems.

Now this isn’t a new idea by any stretch of the imagination.  Back when my Mum was running a customer service training companyand we were researching for her own material I was exposed to several metric tonnes of team-building, management-speak, motivational (sorry Mum) nonsense. To be fair, beneath the layers of trite, glossy, marketing blurb was some pretty good stuff.  Just to be clear, one thing Mum has always been good at is cutting out the extraneous garbage and keeping only the good stuff.  One thing which at the time struck a chord with me was the idea of “‘beginner’s mind”.  The principle is simply that what you need to do is stop thinking about existing techniques and how to improve on them, and instead throw out all preconceptions about how it’s done and come at the problem completely fresh.  Sounds good, doesn’t it?  I thought so too.  I still do, kind of, but I’m becoming increasingly sure it’s not so simple.

First the qualified agreement: yes, if you only consider existing solutions you’ll never get anything more than a chain of improvements over what came before.  A truly innovative solution to a problem, by necessity,has little in common with pre-existing solutions.  Obviously.  Furthermore, I think it’s fair to say that an innovative design just can’t be achieved by successive tweaks to an old one.  A fresh start is to some extent required.  Now for the dissent…

Of course, it should be clear, I have a significan bias.  Speaking (or indeed writing) as someone who invents for a living, I have a vested interest in the accidental innovation thesis being wrong.  However, as I said, it’s not that simple.  Two observations: 1- the effectiveness of a solution is proportional to one’s understanding of the problem; and 2 – in almost all cases, a design is the way it is for good reasons.  Clearly, that doesn’t remove the beginner’s mind principle, nor does it completely eliminate the accidental innovation idea.  But it does change them a bit.

You see, there’s a treasure trove of valuable information contained in pre-existing solutions.  Most solutions effectively solve the problem they were designed for.  The very good ones are embodiments of  neat tricks to efficiently work around inobvious issues which the beginner’s mind would just run into.  Trust me, I’ve been there.  By inspecting other solutions you can learn myriad lessons for your particular problem.  More than that, though most solutions are actually, on inspection incomplete solutions.

It’s easier to think of it with an example, so let’s pick spinning.  There’s probably some common ground there, after all.  Now, the beginner’s mind principle says that I should start with only the problem: turning loose fibres into yarn.  We can go a little further and specify, by twisting them together.  Now, design a machine that does that.  Well, hold on now, there’s some sub-problems there: storing the yarn once it’s been twisted together; getting the finished yarn back out of the machine; resetting the machine ready for the next batch; managing the un-twisted fibres; getting and preparing the fibres from their original source; not to mention down-stream considerations like what happens to the yarn next.  It’s actually a big problem.  Most spinning devices simply don’t attempt to solve the whole thing. The designer picks a sub-set of the problem and goes to work on that.  Anyone with an inventive mind will have spotted an opportunity here.  In studying exemplar designs we can, perhaps see other ways of slicing up the problem space.  A solution which addresses different parts of the problem.  If you’re lucky, and don’t have patents to dodge (or have plenty of licencing money) you can even incorporate the existing works of genius.  Now, none of that seems particularly accidental to me.

There is another issue of course: one that I strive to bear in mind.  Sometimes, after all that, you simply can’t find a repartitioning of the problem, or even a little tweak to other solutions that actually results in an improvement.  Well, in that case, you don’t have a thing.  It is, I think, the problem with the “Let’s innovate” business model.  Sometimes, you just can’t think of something better.  The temptation is to think of something different and call it better, but that’s just empty marketing drivel.  Invention is a higher purpose than just that.  In that situation, I believe the only thing to do is to shrug and say: “well, I’ve got nothing on this one…” and move on to something better.

I guess what I mean by all that is that these little nuggets of false wisdom are okay for amateurs and tinkerers.  Real inventors stand on the shoulders of giants.

Well, that was fun.  I’m of to make something now.

Until next time, happy spinning.

Oops, 3 weeks since the last post.  How shameful.  I’d better have a pretty good excuse!  Okay, not an actual excuse as such, but a reason would be nice.  Well, I have some reasons, and they’re perhaps good ones.

Since the last post I’ve been working pretty hard on two fronts: the first relates to the ‘new thing’ of the title.  Wonderwool Wales was on this weekend, and I was rather unexpectedly contacted by Sparkleduc, asking if they could sell my drop spindles there.  Obviously the answer was yes – which is pretty exciting for me: I’ve never had anyone else sell my stuff before.  On the other hand it meant getting some extra stock available at short notice.  So that’s one reason that I slightly dissapeared recently.

The other thing (the ‘prototype’ part of the title) relate, of course, to the v2 Alien Spinner.  Over the last few months I’ve been steadily experimenting with the various bits and bobs which make up the new design.  The culmination of this is the mechanical prototype:

I feel it quite important to make it entirely clear: this is a mechanical prototype.  That is, it hasn’t been sanded or lacquered; it’s not entirely finalised; indeed, it isn’t even completely finished.  What it is, is a sneak preview of things to come.  It’s also a test bed for me to get the final details sorted out, as well as being a means of figuring out the ‘gotchas’ in manufacturing.  It’s also a pretty big milestone.  There’s still lots to sort out – particularly with the software, but it’s the first time that the whole design has been tangible and in one place.

So I’m pretty excited about that too.  Now I just need to get my finger out and actually make it operational.  Then there’s the testing.  Oh the endless testing.  Still, big milestone.

Anyway, as it’s half six on Sunday evening, I think it’s a good time to bring my working week to a close.

Until next time, happy spinning!

Hopefully I’m not thinking this too soon, but it’s possible that spring has arrived at last!  Looking out my office window, there’s the hint of a promise that I can put away the auto-socks for a while.  Just the hint of a promise, but that will do me!

In other news: the newly redesigned web-site is online at last.  It doesn’t really look all that different from before – the layout has been shifted around a bit, and obviously there’s new content – like you can’t even try to buy the old design spinner now (much to my relief) .  However, there’s been quite a bit of work done behind the scenes.  Not that that should matter to you at all, except that it makes my life much easier when I attempt to modify it.  That does (should? might?) matter to you for two reasons:

1. It means that when I want to add more products/options I can do that easily and quickly, rather than having to do masses of manual HTML coding.
2. Easier website maintenance means more time for making spindles and spinners, and designing clever new things.

The other big difference that you’ll notice on the website is the Modular Drop Spindles.  At long last these are available for sale!  Please bear with me while we get started with these – I’m still trying to build up stock levels, so there may be a bit of a shortage to start with.  Also, the pricing is at the moment, decidedly ‘introductory’, and is quite likely to be subject to revision in the not too distant future.

Aside from all that excitement, I’m still pressing on with the new spinner design.  Although the project is taking a bit of a back seat to everything else on the table at the moment, I’m making steady progress.  All the key elements are now working nicely, so it’s just a matter of honing everything into the right shape.  Thebig issues I’m addressing at the moment are: the weight; precision/efficiency in the drive system; general usability factors.  I’m also having a bit of a look into travel stands.  Essentially, I’m on the 20% of the project that provides 80% of the experience.  So no pressure there!

Until next time, happy spinning!

Well, it’s snowing here again!  Despite the promised 20cm accumulation, we seem to be making do with just a heavy dusting of it lying on the ground.  In general I quite like snow in managable quantities, but I’m really quite thoroughly ready to be warm again.  Perhaps the answer is to invest in some more workshop heaters.  Or start burning the offcuts and the prototype parts which didn’t work out so well.  Hmm… No I’d better not start burning things indoors without a proper fire place.  That won’t end well.

So this week I’ve been working on two things: the website redraft; and the new spinner.  The website redraft is actually a pretty major overhaul of everything.  As a body of work I’m finding it really pretty unexciting, but the proverbial ‘carrot on a stick’ that’s keeping me going is that I’ll be able to start selling the modular drop spindles as soon as it’s up.  Which will be soon, I hope.  I’m starting to get a little fed up of the drudgery of it.  ‘Web programming’ is always a term I’ve somewhat taken exception to.  It seems toequate it to actual programming.  In well concieved languages.  With actual algorithms and datastructures more complicated than strings of text.  Now, I must point out: I have a great deal of respect for web developers – they do a tremendously difficult job, and the need to switch between several languages (HTML, JavaScript, PHP, SQL, for example, and more or less at least) for a single web-page doesn’t make it any easier.  Getting everything to behave just the way you want, in every browser, with scripting switched on or off: it’s no easy task.  That said, building a web site seems to just miss essentially every aspect of programming that I find at all satisfying.  So that’s my excuse for it still not being done.  Soon though.  If I work really hard and am pretty lucky with it.

Aside from the web site, I’ve been trying to keep moving on with the new spinner.  Having resolved the main challenges of the design I’m now just tidying up and honing the usability as much as I can.  That and make it as easy to build as possible.  So it’s getting there.

One of the things that has made the whole process much easier than the last time is a much better (and actually cheaper) CAD system.  Not that CAD is strictly necessary, of course, but it is most comforting to know that it’s all going to fit before I start cutting up wood.  The old CAD software I had was, to put it bluntly, simply horrible.  I can’t think of a simple thing that it actually did well.  But I figured that nasty was simply the price you pay for cheap.  One of my biggest gripes with it is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to meaningfully modify parts once you’ve modeled them.  So if you want to move a hole, for example, the way to do it is delete the part and build it again.  Which is not really any better than just building the thing with wood.  Slightly cheaper on materials in the long run, but certainly no quicker.

However, in a fit of desperate frustration, I had a look around for other system that were not too expensive.  While a complete Solidworks or Autodesk Inventor system would be wonderful, I really don’t have the thousands of pounds available for those.  Something a little down market  of that is what’s needed.  Then I found FreeCAD, which costs exactly what you think!  It’s not really finished yet – the interface is more than a little clunky, but the underlying system is solid.  Most importantly it lets me move holes and cutouts around, change sizes, and generally muck around with stuff easily and quickly.  The only downside is that to get schematics out, I need to do some scripting (in python, which I really don’t like).  But at least that means that I can automate some of the process.  Actually, aside from the python thing, I’m not sure that’s entirely a  downside for me!

 Anyway, this isn’t getting my website built…

Until next time, happy spinning!

So I was going to strictly avoid whingeing about anything this week.  Then the internet broke.  Not the whole internet, of course, just my bit.  My phone line too, actually, so I’m in telecommunications limbo at the moment.  If anyone wants to get in touch at the moment, I can pick up email via my smart-phone.  Slowly.  In my part of the world, decent internet access, be it 3G, or ‘broadband’ is apparently a little unlikely.  We’re more that 2km from the digital exchange you see. 2.1km to be precise.  That means that actual broadband speeds are not available to us.   So on a good day we get 1Mbps, which is not awful.  On a bad day we get 10kbps, which is worse than a dial-up modem.  I’m told that they hope to have the problem fixed by next Thursday, probably.  Not that it will get much faster, but at least I’ll be properly online again. (By the way this is being posted via the Openzone at Starbucks.  Not my favourite work environment!)

All this is compounded by a tech-support call centre staffed by, well, call-centre staff.  Now, I must say, I do have some respect for these paragons of patience.  One of my friends once worked as one, and some of the calls he took were ‘special’ to say the least.  But a 1 hour call to fail to diagnose a firmware fault in my router/modem unit (which I diagnosed in 5 minutes, by the way) didn’t make me pleased.  Particularly when I was asked to switch on another computer, so that I could re-boot it!  Oh well.  I did get a chuckle on reading the xkcd comic which was alarmingly similar!  Anyway, enough moaning: to the good stuff…

It has been no secret that I’m working on a new spinner design.  On the other hand, actually what’s different about the new spinner has been a pretty jealously guarded secret.  Entirely because I prefer to not discuss ideas while they are only ideas.  Not for reasons of intellectual property (I’ve ranted on that subject enough already) but simply because I might have to ditch them if they don’t quite work out as planned.  Such failure is one of the constant risks in anything that could reasonably be called ‘invention’, although I prefer to think of it as successfully discovering what doesn’t work!Over the last week I’ve been doing some experiments on the new spinner design, in particular on one of the weirder aspects of the design.  The make or break part, one might say.  Anyway, the results were pretty positive: the system worked exactly as planned; I learned plenty about how (not) to build the parts in question; I improved the design for manufacturing.  On the whole I’m pretty pleased with myself.  So now I get to tell you something about the new spinner…

Alien Spinner v2:

• Interchangeable Orifice System
• Fast front-loading bobbin system
• Travel spinner design
  • and an optional matching stand, with integrated pedal.
  • also a separate pedal unit if you want one.
• Other stuff which I’ll write about once it’s all tested.

Whoa! Hold on a moment – an interchangeable orifice system, what on earth is that?  Glad you asked.  That’s the bit I’ve been experimenting with.  What it does is let you swap the orifice for a different one, of a different size for example.  Why exactly would I want that I hear you ask?  Well, two reasons in fact:  first, and most obvious, is so that you can spin art yarns with a really big orifice (an inch or 2 diameter anyone?), then switch to spinning a lace weight with a really small orifice (probably down to 2mm if you really want!).  Secondly, I’m not sure how much of a problem this is for anyone else, but I find plying to give me a logistical problem.  Once I’ve started I can’t do any other spinning until it’s finished.  Obviously.  After all, the singles balls  won’t fit through the orifice.  The interchangeable system allows me to simply remove the orifice as well as the bobbin, and drop in a new one!So that’s what I’ve been working on.  I’m pretty excited.

Until next time, happy spinning!

I was hoping that today’s post would have some triumphant arm waving and crowing about the new spinner, but the supply issues of last week just haven’t been resolved yet.  There’s a couple of tests which I can try out before the parts arrive, but then I’m essentially stuck until they get in.  When one of the new parts of the design is the motor system, there’s not a lot you can do when the motor doesn’t arrive.

It’s a shame, because I was hoping to be able to stick a teaser image of the new spinner right here…

I can’t yet, because I don’t want to show off something that might have to change considerably before its final incarnation.  I would love to use this space to let the cat out of the bag about the new orifice system which will cater for a much wider range of spinning (and offer some other neat features too),  but I can’t because I don’t yet know how well it will work.  Erm, so I guess you should un-read that sentence! 

On the other hand, it has freed me up to get moving with the Modular Drop Spindles.  The packaging is now sorted out, and my pricing is pretty much there, I think.  I just need to get some sample units out to the shops that are interested in selling them, and of course (long overdue) update my web-site so that you can get them from there too.  So I guess I should stop writing this blog and get on with that instead…

I’d much rather be inventing something…

Until next time, happy spinning.