SpinnySpinny

I got a new spinning wheel yesterday, a Majacraft Little Gem from a local friend who is unloading her spinning stuff. It’s seen hard use and has some cosmetic damage but is otherwise sound. I set it up and noticed it didn’t treadle as smoothly as it ought to.

It could use some clean-up, being covered in lint, but after a general de-lousing it still needed some help. The treadle mechanism had fiber wrapped around the shaft and in general it was a bit gunky.

Important Note: Professional Driver, Closed Course. Please to do not take this as license to disassemble your spinning wheel willy-nilly. Getting those little parts back together in the correct way is not as easy as it looks.

So here is the patient on the workbench:

Step One: find the metric hex key set. It is conveniently attached to my bicycle tool. You can field strip almost anything with this and open your beer when you are done.

I took off the crank arms, removed the screws holding the center pulley and cleaned the shaft as much as possible. The shaft itself didn’t want to come out so I didn’t push it. With some help from my handy-dandy bench vise (and a conveniently located husband who has better hand strength) I was able to disassemble and clean both cranks.

I could then use the WD-40 to clean the quite filthy parts.

Put everything back together, give it a final once over with the canned air, and it runs much better.