On Mar 30, 2004, at 12:44, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Jacquie) wrote:
I did try wedges first, but I think that perhaps the roller didn't sit very
deeply into the hole, and it was "just" a roller with no central dowel to slide
into grooves.
I have a home-made roller pillow with a wedge holding the roller in place. I also have a Simon Toustou roller pillow, with the roller held by gears/spring gizmo. While I detest the apron on my home-made (we used compressed foam, and the whole thing is bouncy and sounds like a tom-tom when I'm working <g>) and love the one in Toustou's pillow, I must admit that I prefer -- by far -- the wedge as a holding device.
1) With the gear system, you can only move the roller forward (well... you *can* move it back, but with great difficulty). So, if you've forgotten how you'd solved a particulear problem in the previous repeat and want to check -- tough luck. Even worse luck if you're working on a fairly wide lace and/or a longish repeat; your diagonal line of work is going to be too long for comfort. So, you can't follow an element as far down as possible -- bobbin-wise -- to its logical conclusion, then start on the next one higher up again; you have to break in mid-element -- willy-nilly, without rhyme or reason -- and catch up with the "upstairs". Lots of -- unnecessary -- shifting of bobbins from one side of the pillow to the other.
With the wedge, it's no problem at all -- you pull the wedge out, and move the roller any way you want to, with the greatest ease.
2) With the gear system, you can only move the roller at *pre-set* increments (the distance between the "teeth" of the gear wheel). Might be OK, if the "teeth" were really close together but, in my case, every move is about half an inch or more. That might not be much on a coarse Torchon pattern but, on a fine Point Ground one it's a "whale of a lot"! And I can imagine it being even worse (both on point 1 and point 2) with a Binche pattern (but I'm only guessing, never having done any Binche).
There's also a bit of "wiggle room" between the "steps"; you can push the roller back a bit without engaging the next "tooth". I tried to take a Polyanna view of that feature; in the effort of trying to get as far as possible with an element, I'd try working on the "unstable" part without jumping to the next notch. No luck :) So now, it's only one more thing to exasperate me.
With a wedge, I have much more control not only over the direction of movement but over the distance as well. If I don't pull it out all the way but just loosen it up a bit, I can move the roller 1/8" at a time, then jam the wedge back in, to hold the roller in place.
I absolutely *adore* the wedge :) But. The wedge works really well only when 3 things are in place: 1) the "well" holding the roller is a real box (with wood walls), not just a cut-out in the foam (or whatever material is used for the apron). 2) The roller has something solid (a dowel) through its centre, extending past its width (with the extensions resting in the side wall grooves). 3) The roller has (sturdy, as in "wood") "walls" of its own.
Nos 1 and 3 are *essential*; the extensions in no 2 less so (ie, one could have a "spool" as a starter point for winding), though very handy. The wedge has to have something to push against -- hard -- for the friction trick to work. 3 points -- wall of the box, wall of the roller and the central dowel are best, but the first 2 would do in a pinch.
----- Tamara P Duvall Lexington, Virginia, USA Formerly of Warsaw, Poland http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd/
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