Adding Things into Your Life

With all the cold and snow and dreary lingering weather, my sister in law (Cathy) suggested we add 5 things into our life for a few weeks to help us feel better.

1) Sit on the floor more
2) Slow yoga
3) Drink water with fresh lemon
4) Do brain exercises
5) Check off that we do 1-4 each day

Sitting on the floor is hard but it will get me in shape to sit with the sheep in the barnyard when the weather dries out.  Slow yoga isn't hard but takes time.  Drinking water with lemon isn't hard unless you don't have a lemon, I have been substituting a lime until I get to the store.  Brain exercises are hard.  Here is today's.

Let desired wool feed rate be w inches per minute pulled along by a drive wheel of rw inches in radius (the wool moves at the same slow speed as outer rim of the wool drive wheel).

Let desired carding drum rotation rate be d rotations per minute and the drum be driven by a directly connected gear or pully of radius rd inches.

Let desired bicycle rotation rate be b rotations per minute driving a main directly connected gear that is rb inches in radius.

Let bd = (b x rb) ÷ (d x rd)

Let bw = (b x rb) ÷ w

The gear down ratio between the bicycle gear and the card drum gear is 1:bd.

The  gear down ratio between the bicycle gear and the wool feed gear is 1:bw.

I suggest b be 85.

This is the email I got today from the dad of two enthusiastic fiber campers that have been to our farm several times.  I had asked for some help with ratios to build a bicycle powered drum carder like the one on the home page of our website.  cabinspringfarm.com   I keep reading it over and my mind closes down.  John suggested I start plugging some numbers in to make sense of it.  I will try that in a few minutes but I will have to guess at some of the numbers for now.

This is a very exciting project that many are helping with.  K&R's dad is giving me formulas, Elizabeth is researching carding cloth, Charlie is looking for donor bikes, the guy at the bike shop in town gives consultations, John got a pvc pipe from a guy he knows, John and I are going to build the box and put the whole thing together and the sheep are going to provide the wool.  Talk about adding to your life. 

If anyone else out there has anything they would like to contribute feel free.  I have to go do my brain exercise and check everything off for today.