Annie's Blog

It takes a brave woman to start screwing around with the almighty template for blogger, especially one with only a very rudimentary knowledge of html theory. But I accomplished (most of) what I set out to accomplish: I enabled Blogger’s commenting (instead of tag-board’s) and I moved the Fiberarts Bloggers link under the Sheepthrills link. Not bad. Still can’t figure out how to tweak the archive stuff yet, but that will come.

As much as I hate to admit it, I’m really enjoying the time Eric and I have right now away from the kids. They’ve been at DMIL’s for 8 days now, and while I miss them terribly, I also appreciate having the freedom to do some of the things that DH and I used to do, like riding motorcycles. Which we did on Sunday, to the tune of 100 miles worth. And it felt good!

Still working on attaching the sawtooth border to the body of my luxury fiber scarf–I’m behind, but at least there’s one other person who’s behinder! I really hope to be able to send these out this week…

Gotta go to work now (dammit). There are only so many hours in a day, and I’m stuck at a career fair all day tomorrow, away from my computer and the network.

Just a test post to see if some of the tweaking I’m doing on Blogger are kicking in…

While DMIL’s husband was here, he fixed the rubbing problem with my great wheel. Basically, we drilled out the pin holding the shaft to the wheel support arm, filled the pin hole, then re-drilled a pin hold about three-eighths of an inch closer to the end of the shaft. Then we carved a shim to fill the space under the shaft (both ends of the shaft are tapered) and re-seated a new pin.

The result is that the wheel sits about a half-inch farther from the support arm, and because of the shim, at a slight angle to the support arm (about 4 degrees, if I’m guessing right). We used all hand-tools (including a really nifty Japanese draw saw), and I’m thinking that we’ve truly preserved authenticity–this is how any
period repair would have been made (with the exception of the cordless drill we used…)

The drive band stays on well, although the wheel at present does not turn as freely as I think it can. I need to clean and lubricate the shaft and hub. I also need to clean and lubricate the minor’s head and find good drive band material before it will truly spin. Not having the kids around will mean that I can use my dining room table as a work surface and not have to worry about Luke putting a piece in his mouth…

Theoretically, I should be able to actually spin on the wheel as soon as Wednesday. Not bad. And even if it doesn’t spin like a dream, it is a wheel worth dreaming about. Or at least writing stories about.

Question for anyone who has a wheel with a minor’s head…is the whorl on the spindle fixed to the spindle, or does it turn freely? Mine turns freely now, but I’m thinking that it needs to be tight (glued?) on the spindle in order for everything to work properly.