[glacialwanderer], who you may remember from his CNC machine build, recently completed an electric spinning wheel. Spinning wheels are used by knitters to turn raw sheep’s wool into yarn. He went through several iterations before arriving at a good design. Besides the motor, there are two major components to the spinning wheel: the flyer and the bobbin. A Scotch tension brake is used to slow the rotation of the bobbin in relation to the flyer. This causes the wool to twist as it’s pulled on.

He initially tried to just use a dimmer switch with an AC motor. That quickly burnt up. The next version used a sewing machine motor since they’re designed with a variable speed control. Unfortunately, it didn’t have enough torque at low speeds. The final design used a DC motor with a SyRen motor controller. It offered plenty of power and at ~$150 it’s still less than the cheapest commercial models on eBay. You can see a video of it and the spinning process embedded below.

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We’ve been following [glaciawanderer]’s CNC build for quite some time and he’s recently added a few upgrades to make for an even more interesting machine. He’s been trying out new bearing blocks, anti-backlash nuts, and z-axis plates hoping to get some improvements. In the case of the bearing blocks, he went back to the older style because of the added safety and smoother movement. The final addition he made was a dust collection system. It’s just a couple support hoops and duct tape, but it should keep dust out of the threads and rails.