In which we make a wool carding machine for an Alpaca
One of our members, Judit, had a bit of a challenge recently when she got an Alpaca fleece and needed to card it. Wool ‘carding’ is the process of teasing and aligning the fibres to remove knots, and it must be done before spinning the wool. Carding machines are vey expensive, but the actual carding brushes are fairly cheap, so we designed a laser-cut set of drums and frame to make our own machine: Two power drills provide motion. The process is not quite as gentle as you’d expect… But the results were pretty respectable: Next step is getting practice on our spinning wheel to make thread: