DIY Drum Carder

No, this is not a picture of a medieval torture device though it will hurt you if you are not careful! This is my home made fiber drum carder. I built this several years ago to try to speed up our processing of wool. At the time we had about 80 Shetland sheep so we had lots of fiber to process. A big hunk of the price of wool yarn is in the processing and I wanted to keep some of that money here on the farm. When I looked into the price of commercial processing equipment I realized there was no way to just do your own wool after spending that kind of money

 on commercial equipment. For a tightwad like me there was only one alternative, build my own! A drum carder is a fairly simple piece of equipment. The big drum on back collects the fiber, the front drum merely feeds it to the big drum. The trickiest part is the fact that the front drum turns counter clockwise [towards the front} and the big drum turns clockwise[ towards the back]. This is why the belt takes the serpentine route it does. If it simply went from one drum to the other they would both turn the same way.

The whole thing has to turn fairly slow also. Just at a guess I would say the big drum is turning at about 50 r.p.m.s. and the ratio between the big drum and the small drum is important too. The big drum should rotate somewhere close to five turns for every one of the small drums rotations. That is determined by the pulley sizes on the left end of the drums.In order to get the speed low enough I have two sets of pulleys to drop the motors speed down[ right side]. As you can see from the pics I was really not spending any money to build this thing. The bigger pulleys I needed are all made from wood fastened to a small metal pulley. This is a low speed, low power contraption so you can get away with them. Where I really went cheap-o was on the carding cloth, I didn't buy any. I made my own from used rubber belting and a big pile of little bitty nails. If you look closely you will see that each nail has a small bend or curve in it. The big drum's lean back and the little drums lean front. It works but it was time consuming to say the least. If I were to do it over I would buy carding cloth.

 This carder is great for making batts to felt or for quilting batts but they are not combed fine enough to spin from them. Ann runs the batts through her hand powered drum carder once more to get them combed good enough to spin from. Still, it does save some time and I pulled it out of storage to speed things up since we acquired this pile of llama fiber to process.
One other thing I should mention, the distance between the two drums is very critical so the front drum must have adjustable mounts. It needs to be able to slide front and back about a quarter of a inch. At set up, the teeth of the drums should just miss each other.