#also special shoutout to my wife for 100% enabling this purchase

[trashpandacraft]

so you may recall that we have a number of spinning wheels, because of who we are as people and also because i love them. and we decided after buying those that we were done, unless the perfect castle-style wheel appealed.

you may also recall that my most beloved wheel is the pipy, made by philip poore in 1972:

the pipy was far and away the most common wheel that poore made, but there was...another wheel. a castle wheel. called the wendy.

when i was gift-shopping for upcoming birthdays the other day, i was on ebay, and one of my previous searches popped up. and i opened it, obviously, just to see, and because i like looking at spinning wheels and seeing what people are selling.

well, there were nine items on ebay that matched that search, one of which was a wendy wheel, made in 1975, not terribly expensive, and less than 50k from my house.

so you can probably guess what happened next.

...ok, actually what happened is that i waffled about it and made sad noises for a bit, and my wife spent an hour or so whispering do it, do it, and then the obvious happened.

so now for real we have our (probably) last wheel (for now)! and buddies, lemme tell you, she's absolutely majestic. she's so small that if you take her apart, i'm pretty sure she'd fit into a carry-on-sized suitcase. she's so small that if i, a normal-to-tall-sized human person stand next to her, the top of the drive wheel is under my knee.

she also has a delightfully unusual tension system! frame flyers were apparently (relatively) briefly popular in new zealand, and honestly, i kinda dig it?

the rod is actually in two pieces, and they're connected by the threaded ball. turn the ball in one direction, and the upper part of the rod moves slightly further out of the ball; turn it in the other direction, and the rod moves deeper into the ball. this changes the tilt of the flyer, moving it slightly closer to or further from the drive wheel, and thus adjusting the tension. [update: you can see a video of it in action in this post!]

the flyer's slightly cracked, so right now i'm using the single flyer across both wheels, but i'm talking to more experienced people to figure out how best to repair/replace it. other than that, though, she's in amazing condition—it's clear she was treasured, but equally clear that she wasn't used. (there was a giant clump of spiderweb in the orifice, and don't think that wasn't an unpleasant surprise.) but i think we're more than happy to use her enough to make up for the years of disuse.

oh, and in the picture looking down, see that little hole in the frame, just at the bottom of the image? it's so you can screw a block of wood onto the frame and convert her to scotch tension, if you'd like.

she came with her original paperwork, featuring information about how to prepare wool, spin, and knit it, which is also rather charming.

this concludes the most recent (and probably final) episode of 'slightly odd spinning wheels that are older than i am that i have bought for a song'. i know i've said it before, but if you have the chance to play with vintage wheels, please do give it a go. sometimes they're just so-so, but sometimes you find absolute treasures that were made by masters of the craft, and then—hypothetically—you own four of them that collectively have still cost you less than the price of buying one (1) ashford traditional.