Tour de Fleece, Day One.

What a difference six inches can make! And it doesn’t even matter where you measure from.

What? I meant six inches of drive wheel diameter, of course. What did you think I meant, hmmmmmm?

Got off to a slow start today, Tour-wise. Which is fine - I had lots of other stuff to do, and I wasn’t aiming for volume at this stage anyway.

Spent the first part of the day at Lauren’s, and I knew I wasn’t going to get any production spinning done over there, but I did have a spindle project with me.

That’s tussah top dyed by Abby, colorway “Brackish,” on my beautiful low-whorl Connie’s Mjolnir. Mmmmmmmm, Abbysilk. Mmmmmmmmm, Greensleeves. Mmmmmmmm, burl. Three great tastes that taste great together. I’ve been spinning on this, on and off, for mumblety-mumble months. I’d bought the last two ounces of this colorway (hey, I live on a creek, after all, so how could I not?), and I’ve been savoring it. There’s no hurry. But there is some progress. (And this is not the first copp - not by any means. Note to self: locate the rest of the singles for next photo-op.)

Then when I got home in the late afternoon I settled down to the serious business of the day: another time trial. I wanted to see just how much of a difference those six inches would really make - that is, how much faster I could spin for the mile on the 30″ CPW instead of the 24″ that I used for the warm-up.

Answer: Quite a lot faster.

In spite of the fact that I lost a little momentum to take-up adjustments at first, I bettered my time by approximately 20%. And that’s still at pretty nearly a default treadling pace.

That cuts my worst-case time estimate for the mile to somewhere around 12 hours, which is not too shabby.

It’s a whole different dynamic. I really love that 24″ saxony (don’t tell the CPW, but actually the 24″ is my Desert Island Wheel) because I can fine-tune the drive-band tension on it to a fare-thee-well, and because it just, you know, fits me, somehow. I didn’t even notice until after that first time trial that I hadn’t had to cross-lace at all, not even on the first pass down the bobbin - unusual for me when I’m spinning this fine. On the CPW? Oh, I had to cross-lace, all right - in fact, for the first few yards I was double-cross-laced, until I got acclimated and got the tilt-tension behaving the way I wanted it. Still, there’s no getting around it - that beeg wheel, she is FAST. A 20 % improvement in speed? Nothing to sneeze at.

Altogether, not a bad first day’s work, I’d say.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 3rd, 2010 at 11:43 pm and is filed under Spinning, Tour de Fleece. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.