Update On The Wool Picker

The wool picker is coming along, in fact it is almost done. After way too many hours of drilling the holes at a certain undisclosed degree angle and then having to re-set the angle on the other side of the drill press because the pieces wouldn't fit on it, and having to constantly check to ensure the holes would match the ultimate direction of the nails, I am done with that part!  After drilling all 450 holes I discovered that because I was using pine, the board would crack when I went to tap the nail in. This was fixed once I re-drilled all 450 holes with a bigger bit and glued the piece I cracked. After that dilemma, I was then faced with how I was going to keep the nails in tight since the hole was big enough to slide them in relatively easily. Glue, lots of gorilla glue that I applied to each nail with the tip of another nail. The results were strong nail beds and hard blackened hands from the oil and glue. Dave Paul (famous spinning wheel maker ( http://www.themerlintree.com/merlin001.htm ) and I debated over numbers and ideas, how this would sit, how that would sit, will this work, and after many thoughts on how things would work, it ultimately ended up being the most simple solution. Thank god Dave is a patient man! We found our height for the runners and where the nail beds would sit, we also decided on the length for the feed tray and the handle height. Now, the remaining work is cutting and bending the metal for the feed tray, making the top, and adding some wood stain to it! I was not able to take pictures of the process but I will post pictures later of the current stage.