I found an old, dilapidated fanning-mill, and a small grindstone mounted in a frame with a crank to turn it. Anything of this sort I thought might be useful to me in contriving my rope machinery; so I loaded it on the boat.
About the middle of the afternoon we got on board, and after sculling the boat out over the bar set sail for Home Creek, where we arrived safely about five o’clock. While supper was being made ready I built a safe coop for the old hen, with sticks driven into the ground, and put her with her nest into it, giving her corn and a gourd of water, and left her to hatch her brood if she chose. We were all very tired that night and went early to bed.
The next day Mr. Millward and I went to work to contrive some sort of device for spinning the cocoa-husk fibre into rope-yarn. The old fanning-mill came very handily into play in this job. The fan was geared to run at a high rate of speed, and by disconnecting the sieves and shakers and taking off the fan blades, this final piece of shafting could be made to revolve at a rattling gait by a comparatively slow motion of the crank, and with very little expenditure of force. We turned the old machine up on one end and mounted it on stilts to bring the final or fan shaft into convenient position. Then on the end of the fan shaft we mounted the spinning device, whittled out of hard wood and pieces of cane. This consisted primarily of a spool about a foot in length mounted in a framework so that its axis would be at right angles to the fan shaft. The revolution of the fan shaft would now cause the spool to revolve with an end-over-end movement; so that a piece of cord, if one end were tied or wound upon the spool, would be twisted. The next thing was to contrive some method for causing the spool to rotate automatically on its own axis at a slower rate, so as to wind up the cord as fast as it was twisted by the other motion of the spool at a high rate of speed.
This movement cost us an almost indescribable amount of the closest and hardest thought. To complete the machine up to this point took only two days. Then we stuck fast for a whole week debating the matter and trying contrivances which would not work, and which, when they came to trial it seemed as though we should have known would not work, so complete and humiliating was their failure. Finally we changed the whole structure by mounting the spool loosely on the end of the fan shaft itself with its axis coincident with the axis of the shaft, fitting the spool to run by friction on the shaft, while the frame which led the yarn to the spool was rigidly fixed on the same shaft. Now the rapid motion of the frame would do the twisting and the cord would wind only as fast as it was freely fed, the spool slipping at a commensurate rate on the shaft. This worked all right with a piece of cord already made; but whether it would make the yarn out of unformed fibre was a matter to be determined by trial. This trial we could not make until we had built a feeding-table on which to pile the mass of fibre, fitted with a tube of cane to guide the forming yarn to the twister-frame. When this was done the machine proved satisfactory and did the work it was designed to do rapidly and well. It required two to work it,--one to turn the crank and thus furnish the power, and the other to feed up and manipulate the fibre so that it would be smoothly and properly interwoven with the twisting end of the forming filament.