I weave a lot of narrow warps, most under five inches. I found that when using an end-feed shuttle that it was difficult to keep even selvages. I tried many different things including a very tight warp, shifting my seating position left and right of center, different shuttles, different ways of throwing the shuttle, even drilling a hole in the center of my shuttle and re-threading the way the bobbin feeds out. I finally found a very nice solution. Rather than use the conventional wisdom of keeping the fell line between the front beam and being no more than perpendicular to the beater bar (when the bar is brought forward), I now keep the fell line a little more than perpendicular to the beater bar and weave as close to the reed as possible (when the reed is all the way back resting agaist the uprights). It works like a charm!
Now, I can hear those rolling eyes from here. But wait. Remember that this is a narrow warp. As long as I don't stress the warp threads by having a smaller, tighter shed, and as long as the yarn from the shuttle still lays at a nice diagonal when coming out of the shuttle, there's no problem weaving this way. My selvages are super-straight and I can't see a reason why this technique hasn't been brought up for use with narrow projects. Am I missing something? I wouldn't do this for wider projects as the yarn would not lay at the diagonal angle needed.