August 01, 2024
Tour de Fleece Wrap Up
Huge thanks to everyone who spun along with Team EEW 2024 for this year’s Tour de Fleece. The three week period saw hundreds of photographs shared from all around the world, showcasing beautiful fibres and many personal challenges set and completed. 328 people played for prizes, 70% on Facebook, 33% on Ravelry, and 16% on Discord (yes, those numbers add up to more than 100%; some people played in more than one place!). The lucky prize-winners are as follows:
- EEW 6.1 (or equivalent value from in stock items at Dreaming Robots) won by: sfeely (ravelry)
- EEW Cone Winder (or equivalent value from in stock items at Dreaming Robots) won by Teen Ward (facebook)
- EEW Yarn Counter won by: Psylocke26 (ravelry)
- EEW Lazy Kate won by: Penguinwyn (discord) and Benjamin Randolph (facebook)
- EEW 6.1 or EEW Nano bobbins set won by: Kendra O’Hern (facebook) and Knittingmommy (discord)
Congratulations to all the winners, and to everyone else too, even without a prize, you’ve still come away of this with some beautiful yarn and lots of inspiration from all the wonderful pictures shared.
If you’ve not well and truly worn yourself out, don’t forget that Team EEW will ride again from 12 to 18 August 2024 for the Tour de Fleece Femmes as we watch the women’s race.
I’d also like to thank Vampy who did a great job running this event for us (and writing the summary above). She is very active in our community so be sure to give her posts a thumbs up when you see them.
This photo from Ginger Simonson is one of her Tdf projects. This 1:3 fractal Polwarth is just the sixth skein she’s ever spun. During this Tdf she spun in several new places – the car dealership (where a service advisor asked her what a sheep is…), outside, on an airplane, in a hotel, and for one of the challenge days, all four Disney parks.
Clamp Update
I’ve made new free 3D printable files a improved clamp. It replaces a single piece clamp with a two piece articulating head clamp. If you have a EEW Yarn Counter and want the clamp to work better you can 3D print the part r this page explains how to order it from others.
The two main reasons I put time into this was because I’m considering ordering a new batch of EEW Yarn Counters and this was a weakness a few of you pointed out when I asked for feedback. By the way, thanks for this and all the other great feedback I received from the request in last month’s newsletter! The other reason is I am considering adding clamps to more of my products in the future. Right now it’s just the EEW Cone Winder tensioner and EEW Yarn Counter that come with a clamp. Both of these are lightweight and the current clamp works pretty well for most people. However, I’ve been experimenting with including clamps to my future eSpinners, and my beta testers have really liked the clamps. I was a little surprised by this feedback because I’ve long been trying to convey that I’ve designed the EEW Nano and EEW 6.x so C or bar clamps (search online stores and you’ll see lots of options) could be used with them. However, it turns out few are doing that. However, if I actually include a little clamp then way more people try it and love it. This custom clamp I’m designing is lower cost and smaller than generic solutions so it is something I’m likely to include on future designs like the EEW Fold.
I’ve made a video that goes into more depth on this new clamp.
3D Printing Rambling
This is a little insight into how 3D printing and some changes I made recently to improve my workflow. If that interests you then keep reading, otherwise bye bye 🙂
I often release free 3D printed parts for my projects as a way to help my community. I love doing that, but by far the more important aspect of 3D printing for me is prototyping new designs. Without 3D printing it would be much slower, more expensive, and many of my products wouldn’t be nearly as good because I just couldn’t do as many iterations to perfect the design. After I get the perfected prototype, I use injection molding to make my products more affordable. Injection molding and 3D printing have different types of constraints and I design my parts with injection molding in mind since that is my ultimate goal. In general 3D printing has fewer constraints than injection molding, but one limitation with 3D printing is that it needs support when there is no material under the object. Below is an image that shows organic supports holding up some drum caps for the EEW Drum Carder. The supports are those round tree-like structures. Also don’t get confused by the two colors used in this print. I just ran out of filament half way through the print so I changed colors.
The software that generates those supports is clever and tries to leave a little gap between the support and the object being printed. However, if that gap gets too big then the print fails. Often these supports get too stuck to the main object that I spend lots of time removing them. I used to print objects flat, but then more supports are needed and getting them all detached takes a long time. This past month I upgraded my printer so it can print with two different plastics. Many people use this to allow different colors, but I don’t care what color my prototypes are so that doesn’t matter to me. Instead what I do is I use different types of plastic that don’t stick together well. This lets me print the main object out of one type of plastic and then the supports out of a different plastic. These two types of plastic don’t stick together much (types of plastic I’m using are PLA and PETG). Also I can print the objects with better supports and not rotate them to 45 degrees because removing the supports is very easy. The image below compares this 45 degree printing (left) with using different types of plastic (right). You can see there are some rough spots with the 45 degree rotation and those were actually hindering my ability to test my new drum carder prototypes. The prints on the right are basically perfect so I’m quite happy with this upgrade.
3D printing is a field that is improving quickly. The improvements in the hardware and software over the past 5 years is pretty incredible. That’s good too, because the solution I’m using here doesn’t solve all problems. One big issue that still remains is these supports work well for cases like my drum carder model, but I often do supports where instead of the attaching to the plate on the 3D printer the supports have to attach to the model and in those cases this different type of plastic doesn’t work well because the base of supports won’t stick well to the model and then the supports can fail which cause the model to fail later. I’m using a type of 3D printing that extrudes the plastic like a very accurate glue gun, but there are other types of 3D printing that suspend your model in liquid plastic or powder plastic and thus don’t have as many issues with these supports. However those processes are still more expensive or require a lot more cleanup so for my prototypes I think the current type of printing I’m doing is best right now. But it is an area I have to pay close attention to since improvements here can significantly help my business of making fiber tools for you.
Norway Vacation
Emily’s (my wife’s) grandma was from Norway, and migrated to the US as a child. When Emily was young she would talk with her grandma about someday going back to Norway. Unfortunately grandma passed away before that became a reality, but because of those discussions a trip to Norway has always been in Emily’s bucket list. This past month we made it a reality and took a week long family vacation to explore the fjords of Norway. My daughter’s favorite part was meeting some new friends and swimming in heated pools. My wife’s favorite part was meeting some distant relatives for the first time and shopping at Norwegian yarn shops. My favorite was an adventure where we went kayaking in the fjords, hiked up a 340 meter tall cliff to an old farm, and then got stranded without a taxi so we had to hitch hike back to our ship. We all agree that the people we met in Norway are welcoming, friendly, and interesting.
Product Updates
Below are estimates and the dates may change.
- EEW Fold Kickstarter – December 2024
- EEW Nano 2.1 – January 2025
– Maurice Ribble
Inventor of the Electric Eel Wheel
www.DreamingRobots.com
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