IMPROVEMENTS IN LOOMS FOR WEAVING
Year: 1869

page_text: PROVISIONAL SPECIFICATION left by John Wallace Drummond at
the Office of the Commissioners of Patents, with his Petition, on the
5th April 1869.
I, JOHN WALLACE DRUMMOND, of Schenectady, in the State of New
York, United States of America, do hereby declare the nature of the
said Invention for "IMPROVEMENTS IN LOOMS FOR WEAVING," to be as follows:-
This Invention relates to the weaving of fabrics by one or more
continuously moving shuttles that travel in one direction in a raceway
along one side of the breast beam, having a long vertical mortice or
slot down through which the woven fabric passes; then the shuttle is
carried in a semicircular raceway around the end of that opening and
back on the other side and around the semicircular raceway at the
other end, and so on. The fabric is woven double of two separate
breadths, or in the form of a flat bag. The two pieces of fabric pass
down through the said mortice or slot, and the warps are led into the
loom horizontally from opposite sides of the said breast beam. The warps
go through sectional reeds and through heddles arranged to be raised
and lowered by the slide motion hereafter named, or by cams, so as to
weave plain, twilled, or other fabrics. The warps pass around whip
rollers between the yarn beams and heddles. 1 prefer that yarn beanis

page_text: cop.
should be placed down near the floor. The sectional reeds are made of
suitable length and mounted on rods that slide through the heddles and
are actuated from outside the heddles by levers and cams, which bring
up the said reeds one after another to beat up the weft or filling thread
progressively after the shuttle has passed along. The shuttle raceway
is formed as a parallelogram united by the semicircular ends before
referred to, and the shuttle is pushed along through between the warps
when opened to form the shed, and for this purpose a shuttle driver is
used having a roller or rollers that act below the warps, the shuttle
itself having a roller or rollers at its rear end, and carrying the spool or
The shuttle should be curved to facilitate its movement. The
shuttle driver is moved by a belt travelling around pulleys coinciding
with the shuttle raceway but below the warps. The same belt that
moves the shuttle driver also actuates the heddles by rollers or pins
passing above and below slides connected with the heddles, so as to open
the shed in front of the shuttle and change it after the passage of the
shuttle. If the machine is to be fitted for weaving two pieces of equal
widths, or several pieces of equal or varying width, I arrange the warps
accordingly, leaving the proper spaces between the respective pieces, and
at each of these spaces I introduce a small instrument with swinging
arms and an inclined catch with a cutting edge. The reeds drive the
filling over this catch and against the arms; the shed is then changed,
and the arms in swinging around separate the thread against the cutter
and carry the loose ends in between the warps, thus forming the selvage.
By this construction of loom the weaving proceeds with rapidity and
without concussion, and any desired number of shuttles can be used, the
one following the other, the mechanism being timed to change the shed.
and beat up between the passage of one shuttle and the next.