I HATE it when I do that!! (When I sound off with half-cocked results!) I went back up to the tying room to refresh my memory on the "other" kind of thread. And put my glasses on so I could read the label better. Well, it was Gudebrod tying thread. And it turned out it was NOT 8/0. It was 6/0. No wonder it felt thicker.
So I grabbed a spool of 6/0 Unithread and started measuring it. It was running around 40 tenthousandths, compared to the Gudebrod's 34 tenthousandths. Pulled a yard or so off the Gudebrod spool, clipped it off, and then started measuring what was left on the spool. 37 - 38 tenthousandths. Pretty close. to the Uni. Then I discarded about 3 feet of the Orvis 8/0 and re-measured. It was running around 22 tenthousandths, as compared to the original 13 tenthousandths on the section that was breaking. No wonder it was breaking. Who cares about all this? Frankly, I don't. It's a cold rainy day and I'm spending too much time on the computer. The MAIN lesson to be learned from all of this is that if you start having a lot of problems with your thread breaking, pull off a yard or so, throw it away and try again. Even in this modern machine age, you can still get a lot of variance in thickness and strength as you go down the length of the thread To me, the most amazing thing is that they are even able to make thread as fine and as strong as they do today. DEFINITELY crawling under a rock now! Allan ================================================================= >I used a very inaccurate means of measuring thread a couple of days ago and >was very surprised at what I found. I have a spring-loaded dial indicator >thickness gage. Since it's very lightly spring-loaded, it DOES compress >slightly. > >Knowing that it isn't too accurate on soft materials, it's still a pretty >good indicator of differences. > >I had been using some Orvis 8/0 thread and got into a section of thread >that had a lot of flaws and it started breaking like crazy. I had a spool >of another brand of 8/0 thread that I had picked up as a raffle prize at >our club a couple of years ago. Getting frustrated with the Orvis thread >(and I don't blame Orvis, it was just a bad section of the spool), I put >the other brand in my bobbin. It felt much thicker, so I grabbed the >thickness gage and measured it. Five measurements averaged 0.0034 inches. >(34 ten thousandths). Then I measured the Orvis 8/0: 0.0013 inches. > >So the denier measurement is obviously not a good measure of thread >thickness when comparing between kinds of thread. Within a given brand >name or type of thread, it is perfectly good. 3/0 Uni thread is thicker >than 6/0 Uni thread which is thicker than 8/0 Uni thread. But comparing >two brands by the number just won't work without a lot more info available. > >Crawling back under my rock now. > >Allan > > >Allan Fish >Greenwood, IN > >[EMAIL PROTECTED] Allan Fish Greenwood, IN [EMAIL PROTECTED]
