haha these photos have been marinatingmarinating in the drafts for a few days now

anyway
I did most of my shuttle shaping by hand but I wanted the profile a little more pronounced than I was achieving with my dubiously sharp carving tools and then I remembered the dremel and carbide bits. there are some little dings here and there but I got a nice, even, narrow bevel on the lower edge where it matters, and it does a great job beating the weft in straight and square. the shuttle is cut from the exact same piece of wood as the base, I just didn't apply the ebonizing solution to it, thought it'd be nice to see the dramatic contrast.

I'm about halfway through the warp now and. let's say there's a learning curve, to the tensioning. I suspect less tension all around will give me more of an even weave, but ultimately the goal is to use this for tablet weaving, which is warp-faced by design, so this answer perhaps does not much matter as long as I can figure out consistency.

here ends the build phase of Project Garbage Loom (and begins the making of the first little inkle shuttle)

I took…let's say A Lot more photos of all the little bits of patched veneer and disguised filled holes. A large part of my goal with this project was to use not-obviously-useful scraps from a broken table--the long pieces are the aprons of the table, the dowels are from the feet, and the base/tension bar/shuttle are all from the piece that horizontally mounted the leg assembly to the underside of the tabletop--but not have it be obvious that the garbage loom was built from, well, garbage. In some places I have been more successful than others, and in all cases I have learned something useful which was rather the point.

Garbage Loom got its last coats of finish today, which means tomorrow I can bring it inside, take better pictures, and warp it.

Here it is after the initial glue-up with an ebonizing solution (vinegar + rusty steel from the Dad Jar) applied to even out the tones of the veneers, then with the dowels and base attached and the ebonizing effect knocked back a fair bit, and then finally where I left it to let the finish dry overnight (edited in all kinds of directions because my garage is illuminated by a single off-center bulb plus a little LED cabinet light).

What these photos don't show is the color correction I did on the epoxy wood patches, which was a relatively simple matter of setting myself a palette of soft pastel dust on a bit of used sandpaper and adjusting mixes on the fly with a brushful of shellac on the relevant surfaces.

I have enough offcuts of the solid wood to make a good collection of shuttles perfectly scaled to this loom, which I'm quite excited about.

WOW lookit that glue-up, there sure are pieces overlapping one another! I had to trim the ends of my screws because they were just a little too long, in another shocking twist of "making a project using the wood and screws you have, not the wood and screws the plans recommend."

I think probably we don't actually need to talk about how long I spent with the belt sander on its side, holding down the switch with cramping fingers while continuing to struggle to take any material off my dowel stock before my partner came in, looked around, and silently took it away to place in the bench vise and then engage the switch lock whose existence I only remembered when the thing was belly-up like a particularly abrasive and firmly trapped turtle. Safer-ish and more effective this way, do not attempt fetal-position belt sanding (too dubious).