My lovely wife Dana took up weaving a little more than two years ago. She is making more and more complex fabrics on her rigid heddle loom. She often needs notes available to follow the complex pattern and she asked me if I would make an add-on for her loom that would hold them in a convenient position. The constraints were to not be permanently attached to the loom and to not be in the way of any of the weaving or the mechanism of the loom.
I came up with a design where would clamp the desk to the leg of the loom stand and have a standoff that kept it away from the knobs and such on the side of the loom. I measured her usual working angle and matched that with the desk surface, about twenty degrees. I created a clamp out of three pieces of plywood and a t-bolt and knob, two of the pieces slot into the front piece and then the t-bold goes through them and pulls them together against the leg. The front plate provides a mounting surface for the standoff and the upright of the desk. I tripled up the plywood ( maple cabinet grade plywood I had left over from another project ) and created a mounting block at the top. I cut that at twenty degrees and screwed the desk surface to it. I added a bottom edge stop to the desk to allow for a tablet to be placed on it in addition to paper notes.
I made a chipboard template of the clamp parts and cut them on the bandsaw, the slots I cut with the forstner bit and a coping saw and finished the fitting with a wood rasp. I used screws to attach everything in case I needed to make additional adjustments in the future. I sanded all the edges and surfaces and put some paste wax on everything to protect it.
It got a test run tonight and it worked great!
