The loom arrived on Friday, the thirteenth of December. Our movers broke the pallet down into 3 trips – the video starts with the easy one. The last trip is just a memory as my husband and I joined the movers in pushing 2 pallet jacks up the hill with one crazy heavy gigantic box.
Over the next week we built the loom and installed PVC piping to route the air lines. The instructions were great and we loved the included tool box.
Here’s the loom, just about ready to warp. I made a grommet sleeve to run the air hose and pump control cable up to the attic – where the PVC terminates above the ceiling. I left space for the air tube and the control cable. Print your own from this 3D .stl file.
I 3D printed reducing couplings between the supplied air hose and our 2″ ID PVC pipes. You can download what you need to print your own here. We left enough length to roll the loom around the room as you can see on the left in the image below:
The loom operates on a pump which we located in the basement next to a few other pumps that operate our swim in place pool and treadmill. The flex tube provided connects to our PVC line. It wraps around the basement stair to a chase that runs to the attic – you can see the pipe coming up from below on the left of the image above.
Thinking back on the installation I have a couple of thoughts:
- Make sure delivery happens on a sunny day – we were so lucky! There’s no way to get the loom in the house without breaking it apart and carrying the individual parts in, one at a time.
- Have friends who are strong – some of these parts are really heavy. Use your legs and leverage when ever possible.
- Make sure you leave the bolts very loose – looser than you think – as you put the parts together, otherwise it is trickier. We needed to back some of those bolts out to get some of the last parts in.
- Make sure you use the longer cable ties (ignore the color in the video).
- Connect the network cable to the circuit board that the beam cables plug into before you close up the side – fish the cable through the hole so you can connect your computer later.
- Don’t try to rush or overdo it. You will discover new muscles you didn’t know you had.
- The loom control software is on the USB stick in the small plastic box. It runs on your computer so you need to install it. This last must seem obvious but my Louet Megado runs from its own web browser. I have never connected my computer to it and just, wrongly, assumed the TC2 would work like that.
Next steps for me, I think, is winding a warp. We’ll see.
Still insanely excited about this new tool. Thank you Digital Weaving Norway!