Primitive loom

[Rossato]

There should be a primitive and inefficient way to make cloth. A loom is very expensive and need iron, but cloth aren't a so developed resource.

[fishfin]

Agreed! you should be able to do more things without iron.

[joo]

I agree; people were making clothes out of woven fabric long before the advent of iron...

[Crosshair]

Yeah!! *mob with torches and pitchforks*

[trexdino]

Yes, you should be able to make a primitive loom, probably just wood and sinew maybe? But it would work much less efficently then a reguelar loom

[SekoETC]

This has been suggested before (by me I think it was) but anyway, I think it was rejected. In the most simple form a loom is but a frame with warp yarn wrapped around it, then you put weft yarn there, alternating over and under. In more advanced systems there is a way of swapping place of the "over" threads and "under" threads instead of having them all in one layer and having to go around them one by one. If you can lift them apart then you just push the shuttle through the open space, swap the place of upper and lower threads and repeat. The most difficult thing is keeping it tight. You need awful lot of room to be able to tell the threads apart and yet when you tighten it, the result will be just a couple of hand spans wide.

I found this picture, it looks rather primitive. So the question is where is the metal needed?
http://sleekfreak.ath.cx:81/3wdev/VITAH ... /HCA18.GIF

[Rossato]

If I'm not wrong, tissues are older than metal refining in human history. Some people, like the Aztecs, had tissues and cloth, but not iron and steel. So, it's very possible to make tissue (and very efficiently) without iron.

Lots of metal-less communities wants to RP cloths, but without any tissue, it's very hard.

[Piscator]

You can make textiles just with knitting needles actually. I wonder why you can use only wool though.

[SekoETC]

Because other fibers are not very flexible so the resulting cloth would be rather hard, thick and still poorly insulating. It's possible to crochet other yarns though. The selection of crocheted items is rather limited but I'm planning to fix that.

If an iron-free loom is possible in real life then I support this suggestion. Although the primitive loom should be less efficient than regular looms. I think it would be better to increase daily cloth output to 2000-3000 grams on the iron loom to make it worth it's price. Cloth is far too much of a luxury in Cantr and I find it unnatural that even in industrial societies newspawns still need to run around naked or wearing rawhide clothing. I understand this would be a big change but I think it would have more of a positive influence than negative. The only people suffering would be tailors and they have previously received benefit from knit items production time getting pumped up - one could make something with about 4 days of work, then sell it as if it had taken 12 days of work because that's the current.
Edit: And actually no one is forcing the tailors to lower their prices based on this (possible) change, but it would certainly create pressure in the future when it would be possible to produce for cheaper.

[trexdino]

I like it, maybe decrease efficently by an eighteth?

[Dust Puppy]

I found this picture, it looks rather primitive. So the question is where is the metal needed?
http://sleekfreak.ath.cx:81/3wdev/VITAH ... /HCA18.GIF

I once used a loom that looked like that one. I don´t remember any metal parts, apart from screws maybe.

[sem]

or how about this one?
http://www.allfiberarts.com/library/cmot/blloom22.htm
(the weights are bags of sand)

[Piscator]

Moved to implemented.

http://wiki.cantr.net/index.php/Simple_loom