or not...

I acquired this spinning wheel from a co-worker (out of her barn), in an unworking state.   There were a few minor things wrong with it and a couple of parts missing.

I thought of my dad and I wanted to work on this with him.  We took a little time this weekend (less than I thought it would take) and...
WE HAVE STRING!

Not very pretty, not very even...but the wheel is (sort of) in working order.  You can see the slot where a piece is holds the spindle in place and there is a nut missing that will hold the holder in place.  Without that nut, the holder slides away from the whorl (where the outside piece of string is) and the string comes off of the big wheel, so the drive "string" comes off, which brings a halt to the spinning.

Here's the catch.  There are only 4 pieces of metal on this thing - it is put together with wood pegs and all of the nuts and screws are made of wood.  So the threads are carved.  What we need to do is find a slightly larger metal nut than we need and wrap the peg in some sort of fabric to protect the wood threads and use the metal (until if/when we can find somebody to carve a new wooden one).

I also need to find somebody with a lathe who can make a couple of new whorls and about 4 spindles.