My beautiful and talented wife is a weaver. She recently acquired an Inkle Loom which is used to make decorative belts, borders, ribbons etc… It didn’t come with a stand and she asked if I would make her a stand for it. I have made loom stands before so I was happy to make another one. The loom in this case wasn’t really made to be used on a stand so I decided to make this one more generic with a table top that could be adjusted for angle. I would attach the loom to the table top with knob bolts through the table into threaded inserts in the bottom of the loom.
I was going to make it out of maple like the last one but I didn’t have the right size scraps so I made it out of both maple and walnut. I think the contrasting woods look really nice. The table top is pre-finished furniture grade 3/4” plywood with a quarter inch maple band around it, I sanded the pre-finish off because I was going to put paste wax on the whole thing. I put four 1 1/4” x 2” legs through the top so I could have a place to put the threaded inserts and have the top of the table flush with the top of the support legs.
I used threaded inserts for all of the attachment and pivot points so that there would only be one knob to adjust to loosen or tighten any of the bolts. This worked well once I experimented and found the ideal hole size for the insert. Strangely the inserts were metric inside M8 to be specific but the outside diameter wasn’t an even measurement of any kind it ended up being something like 33/64”.
I made the trestles and the uprights in the same manner as before. I cut the slots for the angle adjustment bars on the router table and I did a better job at centering things this time. The through mortise and tenon joints look nice in contrasting wood.
After a few mock-ups to make sure the hardware was going to work ok, I sanded everything to 320 grit and then glued everything up. I installed the table top to keep the uprights aligned and at the proper separation while the glue set. I did a little sanding of the excess tenons and glue and then I waxed everything with paste wax. This seems to work well for weaving tools, the wax lets the threads slip over the wood without sticking or snagging.
I drilled the holes in the top for holding the loom and drilled matching blind holes in the bottom of the loom for the threaded inserts. I had to create a couple of spacers for the bottom because my knob bolts were a little too long.
The nice thing about this design is if my wife acquires another weaving loom or tool that requires a stand we can just drill some different hold down holes and adapt it to this stand.
I think the threaded inserts worked very nicely and I may go back and adapt the other loom stand to use them as well.
Update on October 17, 2023: I just wanted to put up a scan of my crude drawing that I used to build this one.
