I picked this wheel up at a garage sale at the end of the day, when everything left was being sold quite inexpensively. The person who sold it had gotten it used from somewhere else and had never used it herself. I'm not sure it had ever been used to spin on. It came with 4 bobbins, a lazy kate, and even the orifice hook was still there! The label on the front said 1985, Nagy, by Woodspin, Greytown, N.Z. It is a really beautiful wheel,
I took it home, cleaned it up, and started to play with it.
It's a scotch tension wheel by design -- the whorl groove is the same size as the bobbin groove, so double-drive is not likely to work well. It could be set up in irish tension, too, I suppose, but the info I found online indicated that it was designed to be a scotch tension wheel (brake band over bobbin).
The scotch tension band used a hair elastic for its tension. The hair elastic and both bands were not in great shape so I replaced them.
New bands, roving stuffed into loose parts, tension adjusted, new leaders on the bobbin(s), oil anything that looks like it could use oiling...
When I sat down to spin, the flyer kept dropping out of the maidens during spinning, ker-thump. Also, the hole in the back leather was just as big as the hole in the front leather, with a lot of space that wasn't necessary.
Well.
It turns out that this was one of the last Nagy wheels made. The early Nagy wheels are very well regarded, especially the upright. But as the years went by, the brand (and design) was sold and sold again. The final manufacturer wasn't all that careful. Some of the last batch of wheels that were made had a serious manufacturing error -- the maidens were too far apart and the flyer would drop out. Someone on Ravelry said that the problem wasn't that, it was that the threading for the whorl was in the wrong place. I'm not so sure about that being the only problem because even if the whorl was screwed in closer to the back maiden, there would have been a lot of slop for the flyer to bounce around and drop out of the front maiden.
A friend of mine 3D printed a bushing to put in the back leather -- there had been one originally when the wheel was made, of unknown material, but apparently that had been lost years before. That helped a bit. The friend also made a spacer to keep the flyer closer to the front maiden so it wouldn't drift backwards towards the back maiden and fall out. That helped a lot more.
The scotch tension is also a bit weird. I am not 100% sure I have the correct path for the brake band. Also, the bobbin is very smooth and shiny so there's not quite enough friction. It's hard to get the right amount of bite, neither too little nor too much.
I can spin on it. But I have to pay attention! I have to make sure that the flyer stays where it should, and occasionally tweak the brake tension as needed. Somewhere I have the yarn I spun on the wheel, but I'm not sure what I spun or where it ended up. (I try to spin at least one bobbin of yarn on every wheel I rescue.)
Someone on Ravelry set up their Nagy Saxony in irish tension -- wheel band over the bobbin, brake band over the whorl -- and that seems like an approach that might work well with this wheel.
I have/had plans to work on the Nagy "someday" to get the scotch tension set up to be a bit more friendly and predictable. But, it looks like I might be selling this wheel. The buyer is definitely aware of its issues! I hope the buyer can finish tweaking things so that this becomes a lovely spinning machine in its functionality as well as its looks. I am totally happy to take back the wheel and return the money if it ends up having more issues than the buyer wants to deal with.
Maybe someday I'll stumble across another Nagy, but if so, hopefully it'll be one of the earlier models that doesn't have a major manufacturing flaw!
Here are links to info about the Nagy:
https://nzspinningwheelsinfo.wordpress.com/istvan-nagy/
https://nzspinningwheels.wordpress.com/some-spinning-wheel-leaflets/ and in particular, the Nagy leaflets
https://nzspinningwheels.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/nagy1.pdf
https://nzspinningwheels.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/nagy2.pdf
https://nzspinningwheels.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/lnagy1.pdf
https://nzspinningwheels.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/lnagy2.pdf
https://nzspinningwheelsinfo.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/nagy.jpg
https://www.ravelry.com/discuss/working-wheels/3144818/
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