Yesterday I finished giving the Tennessee Valley Handspinner’s Guild Shaker Saxony style spinning wheel a clean and service. I still need to do a little bit of test spinning, but as I did spin on it before and haven’t changed anything physically it should be fine.

I cleaned and lightly greased all the bearings, lightly brushed off all built up dust and then gave all the wood a very light rub of feed and wax. The 200 year patina is still there and the wear from long use still evident.

There are two areas where, at some time, repairs will be needed. The right front leg has a slight wobble on it – the mounting through the bench has come loose over the years. It will need to be removed, repacked and replaced. The other area is the drive wheel. There is a chip of wood missing where one spoke fixing has broken. The spokes are fixed in place by a small wood pin driven diagonally through the rim into the spoke. The fix, whenever it was performed, was to remove the rim and rotate it about an inch and re-drill all the pin holes then re-fit the spokes. Since then some spokes have worked loose leaving the drive wheel with a little bit of a side-to-side movement. Resetting all the pins would likely fix that. The drive wheel rim joints are still tight so the wheel operates fine.

As I didn’t agree to undertake any repairs I’ll return it working and clean and if at some later date the Guild would like it repaired I can take on that job. With care when moving, the wheel will work fine for some time yet.