Hey - coming up with good ways to make the cordage (or not ) is a fun part of figuring this one out! This isn't a job I'd pick a drop spindle for, at least without quite a lot of prep. I'm as curious to see what people can come up with for cords as I am to see the finished slings!

Nice first entry Klarth.

I'm glad you guys have picked up the challenge! This should be pretty fun.

Matthias

I guess you made a spindle wheel out of a drill.
(A spindle wheel being the older version of a spinning wheel, just a stick revolving and a way to get it doing that.)

But please remember that there is no emergecy stop in this set-up and unlike the old fashioned wheel, this one keeps on turning if you get in problems.

So if you can get a set-up that stops when you stop pushing a lever or button, that is much safer.

Willeke.

The easiest/best/most common way of locking the twist in a strand is to ply two or more strands together. If you make one longinsh strand and let the middle "kink" back on itself, you'll see that the twist id reversed, and balances out. Then all you need to do is knot the end or apply a whipping and voila!

With most spun yarns, several strands are pre-twisted and stored on spools. Once the final cord is ready to be assembled, those guys are twisted (reverse of original) together to make a balanced ply.

A neat trick that people might like to try is navajo plying. It is a very clever way of making a three strand yarn with a single pre-twisted one. If you are spindle turning, or storing the strand on a bobbin it works really well:

The idea is to attach the loose end to you spindle/wheel/stick, tie a knot and then pull a loop of the free end through like you were tying a "chain knot"/crochet. If you make the loop really big (say 30-40cm) you'll notice that you have three strands. They will want to twist together, so let them. Once the end of the loop starts getting pretty small, pull another loop through! You end up with tiny little "bumps" where the loop ends, but this is usually made up for in the fact that all three strands are more likely to be identical - yielding really professional looking resuts.

The other easy option is not to ply the strands at all. They'll be a little tougher to handle, but any construction that uses more than one strand, like braiding,weaving,knitting, crochet etc (I know the last two are "technically" one strand) will stabilise the twist.

Joining the pieces is little trickier if you are using a single tape of plastic than it might be with more, or with natural fibres. You should be able to just overlap them a bit and let the twist hold them together. The initial yarn will be a little bit weaker at that point since the plastic is so slippery, but it should hold ok later. Alternatively you could melt the ends together? Or knot them. NO rules in this challenge!

Matthias

And, may be not needed, glue and sticky tape can be used to hold plastic in place while working on it.

Willeke

Dan,
My spining gear exist entirely of one straigth stick.

But I have seen many drop spindles. They are dead simple to make. Take one stick, from 2 mm up to 10 mm diameter is good. Atach a weight. If there is no stick sticking out above the weight you need to atach a hook, if there is, you may leave it as it is, carve a groove or a hook.
The weight can be many shapes, as long as it evenly divided around the stick. Some people make an x from wood with an hole drilled in its centre and use that. The spindles I learned it with, (home made by my dad,) did have a disk of wood at the very top. Up to the industrial revolution weights have been made from glas, clay and different kinds of metal, all with a hole in the middle to put a it of stick in it. A friend uses whatever she can find, like nuts for bolts, wrapped in tin foil and then covered  with Turks head knots or ball covering knots.

Prefered positions are:
-At the top of the stick,
-One quarter down from the top,
-One quarter to one eight up from the bottom of the stick.

The amount of weight decides how thick you spin. With a very heavy drop spindle it is hard to make very thin yarn, with a very light drop spindle it is imposible to spin a thick wool yarn.

I would experiment with a weight like 100 grams for a starter. (That is going on memory for an averige wool drop spindle.)
You might need 200 grams, or just 50 as easily.

If this is not enough, google. You can do it as well as I and I am too lazy now.

Willeke

So let us recycle computer parts to recycle shopping bags

Willeke

Nicely in keeping with the theme! Great example.

I'll admit though that the first thing I thought when I saw the picture was not nice spindle (which it is) but "where on earth did be_slinger find a giant optical encoder disk/flywheel lying around the house?" Urban survival... I once built a shaky leanto entirely out of old hard drives... well, it was a big pile anyways, and it was leaning

Matthias

How do you use a drop spindle?
Rik