I have a persistent flaw in my dec wraps. I have Billy's book and can make great pinwheels and spiders.... except for how the spider or pinwheel centers wander off the center line mark on the blank toward the thread carriage. At first I used a white thread with pencil dots to mark the center as I didn't trust myself to permanently mark the blank. Now that I do know wraps will close, I do scribe the blank itself and try to keep centers aligned as long as I can see the marks. It seems likely that the cause is excess thread tension, but I just use the carriage to hold thread and hold what I think is minimal tension thru my fingers. I need to fix this so I can feel I have achieved minimal competence. Am I the source of my own malfunction?

Pesco Ergo Sum

You have to constantly stay on the look out for this sort of "migration." You can influence which way the centers go by pushing or packing a little harder on one than the other after each few passes of thread.

I never used a thread carriage or tensioner to do decorative wraps, preferring to use my fingers alone, so I can't really say if your carriage/tensioner is the culprit or not.

.................

I think Bruce is using the carriage to hold the thread and all the tension is coming from his fingers, is that correct Bruce?

Chester

May your line be tight and your beverages be cold!

Bruce, it has nothing to do with teh way you lay threads down - even if they are laid down off center the pattern is straightened out when you pack it. I don't even worry about marking the centers of teh pattern perfectly straight any more, because I know once I start moving threads around tha tI will make sure that the pattern is straight.

There are different versions of what "straight" is. Take a look at Sean Endres wraps, and you will see PERFECTLY straight lines running the length of his wrap, teh seam where the threads overlap is perfect every time: [www.rodbuilding.org] He does this by drawing or scribing a line down the blank, and he uses that as a reference when packing. What I use is the glare from the light above my bench, and I sight down the blank to make sure everything is straight. Most of my wraps are not perfectly straight.

I hope this helps?

I have taped a section of thread Bright to see on one side of the wrap And every once in a while I pull it over to check to see if I am packing too much on one side

Bill - willierods.com

Hello Bill.

Good idea Bill.

Bob,

New Bern, NC.

Bruce,

Since your not happy with your current results, you're going to have to be more attentive in both the planning and layout, and the execution of your packing.

Back when my vision was sharp as a tack, I spent more time laying out and marking thread cross points and packing thread than I actually spent laying the thread down. I'd mount a rod in a lathe with indexing capabilities and scribe each axis lightly in the finish. I used a custom spreadsheet to calculate my centers taking into account rod diameter changes due to tapers (on a 4 axis wrap, this would be three unique spacing tables - one each for the top axis, bottom axis, and both side axis). I'd then use a vernier caliper's sharp inside measuring points to scribe the center crosses on each axis to .001" accuracy. My point being that if you want truly superior technical results (like Billy's link to Sean's wrap), you have to do a lot of very precise layout work. Aesthetics on the other hand, are something I have always struggled with.

When packing, you can use the caliper's inside measuring points to check the consistency of your pack from one cross to another cross to make sure they are consistent. If you stay on top of this, you literally can lay down a tight packed wrap where your final thread fills the final available open space in your layout.

Just a quick question as this something i have never tried before.

When you say scribe a line does this mean you actually scratch a line into the blank with a sharp instrument.

Forgive me for my ignorance but i came from a metal working background and when we used a scriber we actually marked the
surface.

cheers

Ray Balmforth
Figtree
NSW
Australia

Okay, how long does it really take to do a wrap like Sean's? As in complete from bare blank to that finished result.

Russ in Hollywood, FL.

WHat John says is true, careful planning and layout and paying attention as you progress will result in better results - provided oyu know what pitfalls you are looking to avoid. Once you run into a problem, you don't make that mistake again...but it's a pain to find teh problems on your own. Anyway, I do less planning and laying out now than I did years ago, and I get much better results much quicker.

Scribing a line - I don't recommend this because a lot of people read these posts adn they might not use common sense. If you're building a heavier blank with a gloss finish you have more leeway in scracthing the blank. If I say yeah scribe the blank with a scribe....someone will be building an ultralight FW rod on a matte finish and they will ruin the blank.

Time to do these wraps - Sean wrapped one thread at a time which is why the seam looks like that. At the time it probably took him 8-12 hours. He cna probably do this in 5-8 hours now. If I were to wrap this I wouldn't do it one thred at a time and it would take about 4 hours, there are others who can do it in less time than that. It depends how fast you lat the threads down, and how much time you spend packing and coming up with new ideas as you're wrapping it. It also depends on teh blank size that is on a Calstar 900M which has a 20mm+ diameter where teh wrap is

What Billy added to my remarks is spot on.

I agree, you need to exercise some common sense when scribing. I'm talking about a fine scratch just barely visible in the gloss finish of a blank, and not on an unfinished matte blank - on a matte blank I would mark with a marker and then scribe the marker ink only. (much like scribing bluing on a sheet metal layout) That kind of accuracy achieved through planning, calculation and layout adds a lot of time overhead to a wrap and if your willing to invest that much time and effort in your wrap then you're probably going to be laying threads one at a time instead of in wider bands further slowing the process. I think Billy estimate on time is pretty accurate for an experienced thread artist to duplicate Sean's work from a close-up image where it is possible to count individual threads or a set of detailed plans, however, if I had to guess how long it took Sean to come up with the final result the first time he did it, it probably was a lot longer because he likely made a number adjustments during the wrap which resulted in many threads coming off and having to be rewrapped.

A good example of where experience comes into play is how quickly you can recognize a corrective change is needed. At the beginning, you won't realize something doesn't look the best until your wraps are either finished or close to being finished. That means if you're going to make a change you have a lot of thread coming off. The most experienced wrappers will notice that something isn't working much more quickly and thus will take off and rewrap far fewer threads to make a change saving a lot of time.

I've been following a decorative closed wrap thread on the NERBS facebook page this past week and the designer has been working through it with visual wrap and posting the progress. Taking input from a number of people, he's altered the design a number of times and posted his changes for more input. It developed nicely, but I bet he's got at least a good 6-10 hours into just fussing with the number of threads in color bands and making other subtle changes and not a single thread had been laid yet on a rod. Dec wraps can be a huge time sink if you really get into them.

John, I used to dump tons of time into VisualWrap....when I was at work getting paid to be a computer programmer. I figured VW was close enough, lol. Fortunately I spent thousands of hours on VW and SAVED all my patterns, and wrote a book and have designed a bunch of other wraps since. If I was not being paid ther eis no way I could have done that. Bottom line...there is enough info in my book and in the Rodmaker magazine articles I wrote, along with hundreds of posts and my willingness to share and help others - so the learning curve is drastically reduced. Do you see some of the first time wraps guys post on The NERBs FB page? THey are doing those really quickly, stuff that would have taken me 12+ hours when I started is taking them 6 hours and they look so much better than what I was doing when I started.

Thank you for your replies. What a great site- personal attention from the best of the best! It is much appreciated.

Billy,

I totally agree with you, lots of first time DEC wraps being posted that look a lot nicer than my first attempts so many years ago. I've got pages and pages of notes I'd like to transfer over to the VWrap software. I finally got mine up and running on Win 7, and am still waiting on an answer about VWeave. I'll be able to put some time on it this July. Will just be tinkering around with it now and then in the meantime.

Are you waiting for a reply from me about VisualWeave?

Billy,
I was waiting for a response from David Boyle. He was assisting me with the install and setup of Wrap and Weave.

John,

Was there much to do to get VW set-up to run a Windows 7 operating system? Do you having any bugs or work around that needed to be addressed?

Just asking because I would have the same issues with my computer.

Chester

May your line be tight and your beverages be cold!

David Boyle from Visual Wrap/Weave was able to get my installation of Wrap up and running after a number of e-mails back and forth. The first two solutions he suggested I try were fairly easy to perform, but did not work. The third solution he gave me which did work was a bit more complex. If you're comfortable poking around in your directories and can search for and find individual files in your windows folders then you should be able to get it operational. I didn't try the fourth solution he suggested, so I can't comment on the ease or complexity of that one.

Visual Weave installed and operated on my win 7 laptop without problems. David did suggest that a newer version of a file would improve the functionality of the help files in weave, and that is what I am working on now with him.

My experience with David is that he responded to most of my e-mails in a day or so on average. Since the first couple solutions didn't work and we had a number of back and forth e-mails it took about a week to get Wrap up and running. As to Weave and the newer file, I've been waiting a bit longer for his response, but it's possible I may have been unclear in my last e-mail. I'll send a follow-up e-mail today.

I'd suspect your average teen or college age tech savvy kid would be able to follow the instructions on the FAQ on their forum without any e-mail assistance and get it up and running. I just lacked the confidence to try it without feeling like there was someone holding my hand step by step throughout the process.

Thanks John for your quick response.

I wonder why the software doesn't come in updated versions for those of us that have different operating systems. I'd really hate to go in and start messing with files that end up making everything malfunction if you know what I mean.

Chester

May your line be tight and your beverages be cold!

Chester, the software was written in a language that Microsoft no longer supports teh compliers for. What that means is the entire program would need to be re-written from scratch. HE just can't update a few things to make it work. If he was selling thousands of these a year it would be worth teh year to re-write teh program in his spare/family time. DAve goes way out of his way to help people get teh program installed, as you can see by John's post. BUt I do know what you mean and where you are coming from, I'm just explaining why it hasn't been updated.