As I posed earlier, I have switched to end feed shuttles. And since I was having some issues with submarining (shuttle flying off the end onto the floor), I built an extension to the sides of my beater. These extension are removable and have a stop at the end with a couple of layers of leather to catch the shuttle if I "miss."
Anyway, as I was weaving, I started thinking that these beater extensions were about half of a fly shuttle mechanism, and maybe I could just build the rest of it. Then I started to think about what I was weaving, which has a floating selvage, and realized that you can't use a floating selvage with a fly shuttle mechanism. First, is this correct?
And if it is, and you are weaving a twill, what do you do with the edges? Do you add some tabby like structure to each side? And what if you don't want tabby at the edges? Besides, to really do a tabby, wouldn't you need to sacrifice two shafts to it? And even then, depending on the treddling sequence, it might not really work. So what DO you do?
I must be not understanding something here, so someone please enlighten me.