Mini End-Feed Shuttle

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by Bluster Bay Woodworks 

One of the things I like about handweaving is the tools: the beautiful woods shaped and polished to a purpose.  Few manufacturers embody this aesthetic as thoroughly as Bluster Bay Woodworks. 

In the interest of full disclosure, I should confess that I’ve been a fan of their shuttles since I first handled one at my local yarn shop.  The finish was so smooth, the wood felt like silk in my hand.  I’ve used their boat shuttles for years.  So when they came out with a scaled-down version of their end-feed shuttle—one that might actually be thin enough to use with a rigid-heddle loom—I jumped at the opportunity to test-drive it.

If you’re not already familiar with end-feed shuttles (EFS), they’re an adaptation from industry.  Instead of the weft rolling out freely as it would in a boat shuttle, in an end-feed shuttle the weft is tensioned.  This constant, mechanically added, tension means the amount of weft in each shot is the same, and thus the cloth’s selvedges become smooth and consistent.

The first thing I noticed about the mini EFS is its profile.  The full-sized EFS from Bluster Bay is 1-3/8 inches high.  Which works great for traditional floor looms, but can be a bit of a squeeze in the smaller sheds created by table and rigid-heddle looms.  The mini EFS has a slender 1-1/16 inch profile which fit through even the narrow shed of my smallest rigid-heddle loom. 

Using a floor loom, I tested the shuttle on wool, silk, and cotton and found the new mini EFS a joy to weave with, especially when weaving at scarf width, when a larger EFS would be unwieldy.

The mini-EFS comes in two varieties, open bottom and closed bottom.  The benefit of the closed-bottom is that you never have to worry about an over-wound pirn catching on the warp.  It also has more heft, which can be useful if you’re throwing across a wider warp.  The downside is that it’s a bit heavier, which if you’re weaving for a long time can tire your arm out faster.  The open-bottom shuttle is lighter.  Having tried out both versions on several warps, I didn’t form a strong preference.

Unlike a traditional EFS, which uses compression plates to tension the thread, a Bluster Bay EFS uses a series of hooks.  You wind the thread through however many hooks you need to create the desired amount of tension.  The advantage of this is that you can easily see and record the path of the thread, making it possible to set that same tension the next time you weave a particular project or weft.  The trade-off is that you have fewer different tension settings than with the compression-plate model and that threading the hooks takes a second or two longer than snapping a thread between two plates.

Another limitation to the mini-EFS—an unavoidable consequence of scaling down from a full-sized EFS—is that the pirn is also smaller and thus holds less weft.  I did quick test of capacity (winding a pirn full of 3/2 cotton, and then winding that off onto a 4-inch bobbin) and found that the pirns for the mini-EFS hold about the same amount of yarn as a 4-inch bobbin.  (Or slightly less if you’re the kind of weaver who really packs the weft onto your bobbins.) 

Overall, I was quite pleased with the mini EFS.  I consider it a wonderful addition to the shuttles currently available on the market.  Its compact size makes it especially handy for narrower warps woven with relatively fine yarns.