Lyon fine-pitch Jacquard loom

August 2020: We received an enquiry from the Textile Centre in Haslach, Austria, asking if we would like to take over a complete Jacquard loom with Lyoner fine stitch setting from an elderly lady. The photos showed a beautiful loom with two Jacquard machines and a finely crafted wooden base. It also came with a matching card-punching machine. After some hesitation, I decided to take over the equipment. I would have found it a great shame if the loom had been stored somewhere in pieces or scrapped. In August 2020, in the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the four of us drove to the Mühlviertel region in Austria in a van, where we completely dismantled the loom, which had already been partially disassembled, and brought it to our workshop in Burglengenfeld.

August 2020: In order to be able to set up the large loom, the workshop first had to be completely rebuilt. The rooms are only 2.90 m high in one area, and the 400 Jacquard loom was already standing there. Its upper structure was modified so that it could also stand in the area with a ceiling height of only 2.70 m. Changes also had to be made to the frame of the Lyon loom. A parallel pull device was installed for the heddle frames. The plan was to enable the shafts to be operated independently of the large machine via the small Jacquard machine.

September 2020: In September 2020, the harness was installed on the main Jacquard machine. The loom is set up so that there is a large pattern block in the middle consisting of 1294 hooks. This is not repeated on the left and right. Instead, there are two areas that can be woven without a pattern. In addition, there are 4 hooks with which the twill edge of the fabric is woven. For the 1294 hooks, this means that only one harness cord is attached to each one. The cords are guided downwards through the comber board, making a 1/4 turn in the process.

January 2021: It was not until the turn of the year 2020/2021 that the next step could be taken: attaching the heddles. A single heddle of steel wire was knotted to each harness cord coming from the Jacquard machine.

December 2021: A whole year passed before the loom received its first test warp. This was mainly used to check the function of the Jacquard machine and to make fine adjustments so that the needles in the mechanism would hit the holes in the punch cards exactly. To do this, the cylinder over which the punch cards run must be precisely aligned.

December 2023: In December 2023, the loom will receive a new warp. Over the past two years, punch cards for two patterns have been created and plans for what is to be produced on the loom have been finalised. When the new warp was being set up, the rods that the predecessor had attached to the warp beam broke. They were probably simply too thin for a longer warp.

2024: The loom is still missing important components that are needed to produce anything on it. In January 2024, the warp beam will be fitted with suitable ball bearings. These bearings are part of a complex warp tensioning system that transports the warp during weaving and keeps it under tension. The first parts for the regulator will arrive from the USA in April 2024. However, the individual parts will have to undergo extensive reworking to ensure that the American dimensions match the other parts from Germany.

January 2025: A lot has happened with the loom in 2025. In January, the regulator was provisionally installed. Several iron parts were painstakingly shaped by hand. In addition, the card run was installed, in which the many punch cards will later hang during weaving. In contrast to the other looms, we opted for a flat iron construction here because the cards are extremely heavy. In order to mount the warp beam and regulator on the loom, two brackets had to be built and mounted on the two front loom posts. The ball bearing holders are mounted on these brackets.

We continued with the rear part of the loom. Here, we fitted a second warp beam with a rope brake. Two metal tubes were mounted on the warp beam so that a brake rope could be guided around them. Metal discs on the sides prevent the brake cables from slipping. Two brake levers were attached under the warp beam, which can be used to regulate the braking effect on the warp beam with the aid of a weight.

At the end of January, the fine-tuning of the regulator was also completed. The lever of the regulator is set in motion by a cable pull connected to the drive shaft of the Jacquard mechanism. The leverage effect can be regulated by means of an intermediate lever.

August 2025: While testing the now fully functional loom in the summer of 2025, we noticed that the small carabiners below the Jacquard mechanism can interfere with each other and get stuck together. This causes flaws in the fabric and cannot be controlled. While the carabiners are separated from each other in one direction by glass rods, this separation is missing in the other direction. With the help of an American colleague, we therefore decided to install a second level of separating rods beneath the glass rods.

October 2025: However, due to the installation of the separating rods under the Jacquard mechanism, the heddles were no longer at the same level. In a final effort, we therefore re-knotted the heddles using a knotting system that we had already had very good experiences with on the small Jacquard loom. Metal heddles have a tendency to loosen the knots when the harness rope is tied directly. Instead, we inserted a loop that is connected to both the heddle and the harness rope with a horse's head knot (which is actually just a slip knot). There is now only a stopper knot on the harness rope, which prevents the loop from slipping. However, there is now no more tension on the knot itself, so it cannot loosen. In a second step, the heddles were brought to the same level and all protruding rope ends were removed. We completed this work in November.

December 2025: In December 2025, the Lyon Jacquard loom finally got a warp again and we started working on it. The effort was worth it, as you can see from the results.