Shire's Tabletop loom

This project was a long shot for many reasons: one of them is that I have never seen a tabletop loom in action and that the entire design was reverse-engineered from the PDF of a user's guide for a commercial loom.  The second reason is that this is my first project that I have done with rough lumber as a starting point. After biting the bullet and purchasing a jointer, a planer and a bandsaw, I headed to the local specialty sawmill and got myself a bit of Birch and Sapele. The design objective was to play with the dark/light contrast of the two species to create an interesting effect. Another design decision was to make the entire loom in hardwood: making the heddle and the ratchet gear was far from trivial and ended up taking on probably 90% of the time to make this piece. Of course, the original ratchet gears' teeth were too shallow and I had to restart from scratch... In the end, I'm happy with the results and learned so much along the way. Here are some random thoughts:

1. The drill press is my friend. I almost returned it when I realized how big that monster was in my tiny shop. However, I have yet to use a hand drill since I started using this bad boy.
2. Working out the entire thing in Sketch-up is worth the time. I would have seen the clash between the ratchet dog and the transversal support if I had worked out the loom in 3D. I didn't because I thought the whole thing to be obviously without pitfalls.
3. When milling thin stock such as 1/4" birch boards, mill a bit on both face to avoid cupping. I have yet to confirm this, but the only boards that didn't cup were these that I milled from both sides at the same time.
4. Sapele smells so nice when freshly cut. Just that could make my day. And Sapele's golden grain is absolutely beautiful. I'm glad that it isn't a particularly expensive wood to purchase.
5. A chemical respirator is NOT a luxury when working with oil-based finishing products.

The Heddle

This bit was the main challenge. I made a jig from a piece of MDF and some 1/4" birch scraps. The jig fitted snugly one of the board used to make the heddle's teeth. Although the initial idea was to fit 4 teeth per inches, I increased the total width of one cycle (tooth plus space in between) to 5/16". The teeth were routed from three boards with a 1/16" router bit (the smallest one at Lee Valley). Being so small, the bit got burning hot in only a few seconds, which means that I had to rout no more than two teeth before taking a break of about 5 minutes.  The eyes in the heddles were another source of worries as screwing a single one meant to discard about 1/3 of the heddle in one fell swoop. Routing a 1/16" eye in a 4/16" tooth simply didn't work. I resorted to using the drill press to remove most of the material over 1/4", then clean the eyes with a bench chisel. This was one time consuming step, although it was done much faster than the routing part since I didn't have to deal with overheating.

The whole thing came together pretty much as planned. The end teeth between the sections are somewhat closer than I'd like, but I'll fix this up with sanding or a flush saw if this is a problem when weaving.

The Ratchet system

The idea is simple: a piece of birch sandwiched in two piece of Sapele. It does look like a frozen treat to an extent. I started with a 8 teeth gear, which was limited to 1/4" depth per tooth. This proved to be not enough. My second set of gears use a much deeper tooth system, thereby limiting to 4 teeth per gears. This should be enough in practice to control the warping yarn (I hope). Doing this was fun. Although I would have been OK with fitting metal or plastic gears if I could have found a set with the right dimensions.

Putting these together

The rest was astoundingly simple to put together. I had to improvise with the fact that my 3/4" spade bit was a bit larger than the 3/4" dowels that I used in the mechanism. To fix this problem, I inserted a few strips of Sapele in the dowels to create a tight fit. The results look pretty good.

Finishing was done with "boiled" Danish oil (2 coats) and hand-applied polyurethane (4 coats). I could have done more coats of polyurethane, but I think that this will do (and Christmas eve is today so the time has ran out). A few anti-skid pads under the body, some felt patches to protect the heddle and two clear bumps to make positive stop guides to keep the heddle centered, and all that's left to do is to put the loom under the Christmas tree.

The name comes from my wife, who rightfully suggested that the look was in line with what could be found in Tolkien's shire. I love my wife.