Walking Wheel

The Lady of the House wanted a great wheel or walking wheel, a type of spinning wheel that predates the modern flyer-type wheels. Actually I think a great wheel is slightly different from a walking wheel, but the idea is much the same.
Basically it's just a big wheel driving a small spindle, so surely that must be easy enough to make from a old bike frame...
This idea was to use the rear triangle and bottom bracket. The spinner has to turn the wheel by hand, and keep in contact with it, so half the rear triangle had to go. To get the wheel to align reasonably with the spindle pulley (or whorl as spinners seem to say) I had to crank the chainstay over considerably, which needed some hot forging. More hot forging to draw out a spindle from a bottom bracket axle. This comes to a fine point (it's what Sleeping Beauty is supposed to have scagged herself on). A 3D printed pulley finished that part off.
Now, it needs to stand on something. It needs to be at a convenient height to use standing up, so my first idea of using the headset and seat tube was out. I cut the front tubes off, and used the top tube to extend the seat tube to the right height. A flat handlebar forged into a smaller angle makes a reasonable tripod base, although not as robust as it might be. Still, it works.

And here it is...

And a detail of the spindle

Forge extraction

The forge is now housed in its own shed.

Lovely, isn't it. It also has a better blower. The heater box really wasn't doing it, so I bought a bouncy castle blower off ebay. That does it - maybe too well.  The only trouble is, if you look carefully you can see that the fumes aren't actually going up the chimney. When there's a lot of smoke coming from kindling it is unbearable. The first chimney was 1m of 5” flue. I tried upgrading to 1.5m of 6", and raised the hearth closer to the cowl; no better. Then I noticed that it was drawing OK before I turned the fan on. As soon as the fan came on, there was a massive downdraft pulling the smoke back out of the flue. Using a bouncy castle blower there is a lot of spare draft, and with the vent closed it all comes out of the bottom of the tuyere, through the ash plate.

So, we need to put that waste air in the right direction. A T piece in the air duct was easily fitted, allowing me to fit a length of dead exhaust pipe ducting up into the cowl. This didn't really help at all. It caused a lot of turbulence at the entry to the flue, and I could see the smoke rising up then turning around and coming back down. Extending the duct right into the flue did it, now there seems to be a nice laminar flow right up the chimney. I can now light the forge and breath at the same time. Here's the "after" view, with added lights as well.