The state of the Bergman Loom

Once we got the loom set up into its most basic shape, a few things became evident.  The heddles were a mess.  The owner's husband told me that there were a "lifetime of heddles" in the box, but there were hardly any on the loom itself, less than 100, most were knotted and tangled, and there were just a few bundles in the box, I wouldn't have guessed more than 5 or 600 total.  I told him I currently kept about 1100 on my jack loom and he acted astounded, so before I even had it home, I knew heddles would be an issue.

The ad on Craigslist had also said that a partial conversion of the tieups had been done to TexSolv.  I didn't really know any better, the treadles were disconnected for travel anyways, and I knew nothing about countermarche tieups, so I just figured I'd learn from what had already been done.  I put it on a back burner, while I researched countermarche tieups, particularly Bergman.

A friend on Ravelry suggested getting underneath and just tying up like I would on my jack loom, and then assigning the rest of the spots after.  Well, that made sense, more than anything else, so I decided to climb under and see what I could make of it.  Aaaaaaaand... I discovered that the "conversion" was actually texsolv HEDDLES just hanging from the lamms.  No measurement had been done.  The old rope was actually still in the treadles.  I was starting with truly nothing, not even a clue of how the rope HAD been connected, once upon a time.  Panic set in.

I really couldn't make sense of the decision to use heddles.  There wasn't even a way to connect them to the treadle.  I learned from posting this picture online though, that I had actually put the treadle assembly in wrong.  The knots were the old bottom of the treadles, I had to pull off the bar, flip the treadles around, turn the bar 180 degrees and put it back in.

Once it was switched, I could see loops on top, which the old cords had been knotted to, and the little tape labels marked 1-10 to keep track of the treadle sequence.  One issue solved, but the bigger problem remained of what to do with the ties.




Many thanks need to be given to the Bergman Looms group on Facebook for the next part, because I was totally stumped.  The idea of countermarche looms being totally foreign, things weren't clicking.  My jack loom, you press a treadle, it lifts the appropriate shafts, and that forms the shed.  On a countermarche, you depress a treadle, and part of the shafts rise up, and some are pushed down.  In a nutshell, you do an initial tie up, to the lower lamms, and then go back and all of the blank spaces on a draft, you fill in with the upper lamms.  The lower lamms raise the shed, like a traditional jack loom would, and the upper lamms lower the shed creating more depth.  Once that was decoded, things started looking much clearer.

So I gathered some bravery, some texsolv, ordered some arrow pegs, and got to work.  The most important thing to keep in mind was really the jacks at the top needed to be locked.  We both did some minor adjustments later, after I had unlocked the top and it did NOT go well.  The cutting took time, but actually placing the pegs wasn't too awful.  Somewhere I had seen people putting one peg through both of the cords that went through each hole in the treadle, but once I started weaving, the arrow would slide out of one on some of the treadles, I found one peg per cord worked better than one peg per hole.

Tied up!