Warp Weight Spool for Weaving and Kumihimo

Warp weights can be expensive. This one is cheap.

Materials and tools needed

• Filament of your choice (I used silk PLA)
• Up to 29 US pennies
• Approximately 3/8" cup or eye hook screws
• Glue, cyanoacrylate or otherwise (optional)
• Diagonal cutters strong enough to cut through the cup hook

Print recommendations

• 0.16mm layer height for the threads to work well and print without supports
• 100% infill
• Adaptive layer heights are great for this model. Using Cura, I set my base layer height to 0.24mm and Adaptive Layers Maximum Variation to 0.16mm. This gets you nice, well-shaped threads without spending an excessive amount of time on the body of the spool.

Assembly

1. If you have eye hooks, open them slightly with pliers. Skip this if you have cup hooks.
2. Screw the hook into the hole at the top of the cap as far as it will go.
3. Use diagonal cutters to trim the threaded end of the hook on the interior of the cap. There will be some left sticking out and that's okay, because…
4. Optionally, put a drop of glue on the threaded end. Unscrew the hook slightly to draw the glue into the threading and retract the trimmed end.
5. Fill the spool with as many pennies as you want for the weight you need, and screw on the cap.

Uses

• Hang the weight from loose warp threads on a floor, table, or rigid heddle loom.
• My favorite: warp weighted tablet weaving. Use one weight per card, and wind the warp for that card on the spool. Knot as you would a kumihimo tama to keep the warp from unspooling, and run the warp through the hook to keep the weight vertical. This makes it super easy to weave patterns with twist buildup because you can just chase the twist to the weight and let it spin.

Model customization

• I have attached the customized OpenSCAD file I used to generate the base threaded box (because threading in FreeCAD is a nightmare). Note that the diameter of the box is set to 23.5 in the code, but rounded to 24 in the options view. This should export as 23.5 unless you change it. For the final spool, I enabled holes in cap and box; this generates a cylinder for the body, which I later modified in FreeCAD.
• The cap is printed as-is from the OpenSCAD STL export.
• The FreeCAD file has the changes I made to the STL exported from OpenSCAD.