Cleaning and Lubrication (and a bit on cams)

The manual (remember this is really old) suggests cleaning wood & metal parts with kerosene. I thought that sounded smelly and harsh, plus it's not something I have on hand or want to store, really. The manual suggests oiling everything with machine oil. By everything I mean EVERYTHING. Metal parts that rub on metal. Metal parts that rub on wood. Wood parts that rub on wood! This is a less-than-ideal lubrication method. Oil will turn the wood dark & can wick out into the woven cloth, plus it can turn sticky, so I really wanted to find something more suitable.

I started by cleaning the wood with Murphy's Oil Soap. I use this on all my looms, as it's very gentle and feeds the wood a little bit. It didn't damage the paint details, so I'm happy. And I kept it far from the decals, which are just paper, and coming loose in places. (If anyone has thoughts on protecting & re-gluing 80+ year old paper decals, I'd love to hear them.) The Murphy's didn't get the loom really *clean* yet, so I will have to clean it at least once more. My first bucket of water was black, so it's definitely working!

When I use Murphy's, I use a wrung-out sponge to apply it & rub gently, and then follow that up right away with a clean rag in the other hand. Leaving the wood wet for long can do bad things to the finish on looms, in my experience. The finish is usually old & fragile on these things, no need to stress it any more than necessary.

The previous owner(s) of this loom knew a lot about antiques, and it shows in the care they took with it. There was no tape (I have dealt with duct tape, masking tape, etc. and it's always nasty & impossible to remove without removing the finish as well), no more rust than I'd expect on a loom this old, and very little water damage. In my experience most old looms have some, perhaps because the finish is so thin.

I did some research on what products to use to clean & lubricate the metal parts, and ended up more confused than when I started. The range of opinions on what to use on looms is very broad. Everyone seems to agree that WD-40 is bad, since it leaves a residue film that hardens in time. I have avoided it for years for this reason.

Instead, I have used sewing machine oil on looms as well as sewing machines and knitting machines, because it is clean and has no additives to cause problems in the future with oxidation, and no detergents that will attract dirt or water. But in my research I learned that sewing machine oil isn't really adequate for parts like gears that have load-bearing metal-to-metal scraping or grinding action. In that situation you need a product that contains a good oil but you it also must contain a good boundary agent as well.

What is a boundary agent? I didn't know until I read this amazing article I found on lubricating guns, which provided a lot of good information on how lubricants work, but left me wondering what to do for load-bearing grinding or scraping parts, since guns don't really have loads to bear. But even knowing that's a problem for this situation is way more information than I had before reading this:

http://www.grantcunningham.com/lubricants101.html

Other weavers & Weaver's Delight owners on the Rugtalk yahoo group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Rugtalk/
made lots of good suggestions too. STP, machine oil, lightweight motor oil, white lithium grease, even vaseline. All of which have their merits. And none of which I had on hand.

In the end I decided to clean the metal parts with "3-in-One" oil, since I had some on hand. It's not the best product (for either guns or looms), and not what I would buy today, but it's not a bad product (from what I gather) and I decided it'd be adequate for cleaning.

After I applied it & worked the mechanism to work it in a bit, I removed all I could, along with gobs of black gunk. That black stuff is ground-up metal, you want to get it out of there, as it will cause damage to moving parts.

For a lubricant, I used Tri-Flow, which I bought years ago for mainaining bicycles. It's a good quality lubricant which includes teflon as a boundary agent. I don't know if it's ideal, but it's a good product & again I had it on hand, so I decided it would be a shame to waste it.

Now the gears move ultra-smoothly. It's very exciting!

Here is the gear mechanism at the heart of the loom. This is the back side, showing the gears & the slide that moves the "fork" (that loop of iron at the bottom):

And here is the front side, showing the cams which lift the shafts:

There is one cam per shaft, so 4 cams total, stacked one on top of the other on a rod and held with a nut (you can see the nut at the front). These 4 cams each cover about 1/4 of the circle, and are set up for doing 2/2 twill, which the manual calls "Kersey twill". Here are more cams that came with the loom:

Here is a rear view of the mechanism installed in the loom. The fork drags a wooden piece called the trigger stick side to side:

And here is a front view, showing the cams and the "stirrup" (that anchor-shaped thing at the bottom). The end of the trigger stick rests on the stirrup, and causes it to flip left and right with each pick, which causes the picker sticks to move, throwing the shuttle:

You can see that the end of the trigger stick is black on TOP. We installed it according to the manual's instructions, but the wear marks & iron marks (that black staining) on the wood suggest it has always been used upside down. I will flip it over soon & see if it moves better that way. Maybe the previous owners knew something I don't? Like maybe the manual was wrong on this point? In any case, the black surface is smoothed and curved so nicely (perhaps from wear) that I think the loom may work better once it's flipped.

Note: These photos are all before cleaning & oiling. It looks better to me now, but probably wouldn't look much different in a photo.

For lubricating wood-to-metal rub points, the ideal is paraffin or candle wax. For these points I use a bit of candle & rub it on the right spots. There are a few points that I'll be able to reach with that, but some others are not reachable with a candle, so for those I ended up letting the Tri-Flow get in there when I was oiling other parts nearby.

For lubricating wood-to-wood rub points, many recommend Johnson's Paste Wax or other floor-wax type products. I think I remember buying some Johnson's but can't find my can of it since we moved 4 years ago. I thought I knew where everything went in the move but I'm gradually discovering that there must have been one box that got lost, a box which contained a really odd collection of stuff I would normally not have thought to pack together. (grin)

Once the wood is cleaned & waxed adequately, another recommendation I've heard for making the shuttle's travel as smooth as possible is to use talcum powder. This makes sense to me, it would work like graphite powder (used to lubricate locks & other things that can't get gummed up with oil) but would not stain the cloth.

Today's project is to continue cleaning the shaft rails & heddles. I am using fine steel wool to clean & polish the rails & then putting on a small amount of Tri-Flow, which I then wipe off again. This leaves a very small amount, hopefully enough to prevent further rust. I have not decided how to handle the heddles. I hear that soaking them in vinegar & then washing & drying well will take off rust. The weaver who recommended that to me also suggested using a very light coat of silicone afterward. I've heard enough bad things about it that I'll probably just use the Tri-Flow again if I do that, and use it mainly in the loops where the rails run. For less rust I have just rubbed heddles with steel wool, in the past.

Please feel free to leave comments on your favorite cleaners & lubricants, and ones you don't like too. I moderate comments, so it won't show up immediately.

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