February 24, 2016

Shuttle me away!...

I picked up some large bobbins while shopping at JoAnn's one week.
I was wanting a shuttle that would hold more thread thus reducing the amount of ends I would have to hide on my tatting projects. I tried "making" them fit my Aerolit shuttle and that poor thing snapped in half. Then I tried a metal bobbing shuttle and it was warped out of shape so bad I had to throw it away. The idea then came to make a housing for these bobbins out of clay and cast a mold for it to make it out of resin later. Let's just say, I wasted a lot of clay. Ironically, it was a broken Christmas ornament ball and another Pintrest roaming session that paved the way to a housing for these bobbins.

This ornament gave me enough blades to make 4 shuttles. The instructions (once again vague) just says to glue the bobbin in between the blades. Okay...first try..

These broke apart as soon as I started trying to wind the shuttle up with thread. Then I tried E6000 glue and that was even worse. I could not salvage those pieces. I was getting upset, I needed a strong bonding agent. Duh, resin! I used UV curing resin because I wanted to see if this would work better.

 One problem I encountered quickly was the forming of a large air bubble under the center post. I solved this problem by filling in the center with some more resin and then tilting the shuttle from side to side until the air bubble was pushed out.
Now attaching the other side was going to be a challenge on its own. The first one I just cut above the bobbin hole and dripped the resin in and cured it that way. This left it looking kind of ugly, so I added a sticker and domed that with more resin.
 This size on these compared to other shuttles I already own.


One thing I love about it, it's small shape. That's also one of it's downsides. It can be too small and I want to throw it when I tat with faster speed. To try to fix this problem, I cut the blades longer and that helped out a lot.

This one is much more comfortable in my hand. However, when I hold the shuttle closer to the tips, it feels like it's going to collapse. The ends snap back to themselves, so it's not a fear of them becoming sprung out. The center bobbin is large enough to give a solid base to hold onto it. Also, since this is a thin plastic material that was used, it will melt with high temperatures. I tried using a hot glue gun and the glue melted the blades. It may be a better idea to cut the blades, make them a bit thicker and mold that shape. Then they can be cast out of full resin and hold up to the temperature variations. I wasn't planning on selling these, the instructions are pretty simple to do. Then I realized that these bobbins may be a limited supply thing, I did pick them up on clearance. I made a short video and posted that to YouTube, but maybe I should make a few of these for sale. Let's see how they hold up before I do that.

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