Well it’s been about a year since we started up the mill. We have learned a lot. Most of it concerning how to keep a cranky older machine running. We have greased and oiled, adjusted and tinkered. Some days it runs like a dream and you almost forget the stress it caused yesterday. Then it will decide to be persnickity and you remember the stress. Mostly I think it just doesn’t want to be run 8 hours a day 5 days a week. We are considering replacing it with a newer carder and hopefully passing this one on to someone who just wants to run a few fleeces occassionally. When it is running though it produces some really excellent light and fluffy roving. We always run each fleece through at least 2 times and sometimes 3 times. It blends beautifully. It also removes a very large amount of VM and I sometimes am fearful that anything we replace it with will not do as good a job on those issues.
Well nothing is happening immediately. We finally made contact with our engineer to go over it and adjust everything and it’s back on track after a difficult winter. I really think we’ve worked out all the bugs now and have a very clear handle on how to keep the machine up and running. I will admit that it has been hard to work consistently this winter with the amount of snow and other bad weather we’ve had this year. We are considering closing down for December and maybe January next winter.
It’s almost shearing time again and we’re still in business and we still love wool. We’ve met some wonderful people this year and we thank everyone for their business and their patience while we’ve worked these bugs out. We hope that this year we’ll meet even more create fiber types. So let us know when you’ve got your shearing done. We’re still here and still working.
A Fiber Full Diet 