Best Belated Birthday Card(er) Ever

is a “Motorized by The Man” carder.

It’s been in the works for a while (birthday was back in Jan), and we were really close to a solution a couple of weeks ago.
The first try was with a belt sander, coupled to the drum axle with a chuck from a drill.
Only problem- it rotated counterclockwise.

Plan B involved the sacrifice of an old White sewing machine that we found on craigslist.
Here it is after already having donated all the necessary internals-

And here is my old carder hooked up to it’s new power source-

which is controlled by the footpedal from the sewing machine-

I’ve been playing with it a bit today, and it is really cool. The foot pedal leaves my hands free for picking and feeding in the fiber, and when the motor is not running I can manually turn the drum backwards to remove the batt without having to undo anything.

And I can always remove the pulley and put the handle back on if I need/want to go back to arm power.
Will try to shoot a little video sometime this week of the newly energized machine in action!

And in case you’re wondering what ever happened to my Tuin sweater- it is finally starting to look like something!

Don’t know that I would ever sign on for this much duplicate stitch ever again (millions of ends), but I think it’s turning out pretty neat. 🙂