Finished clew jig
This tutorial series has been taking a while longer than anticipated, but hey, life can be a lot more difficult than you anticipate.
The next step in making a Mayan hammock is to create the clew. The clew is the name for the supporting strings that attach to the ends of the hammock. In traditional western hammocks, the clew is usually an array of ropes that attach a wooden spreader bar to a metal ring or something similar. However for a Mayan hammock, the clew is a bundle of hundreds of thin strings, just like the bed of the hammock. A special jig can be used to help facilitate the creation of the clew, although I remember reading one source that stated some hammock makers manage to use their ankle instead of a wooden frame and peg, so if you're feeling confident that might be an option.
To make this clew jig I used leftover pieces from making the hammock loom - you can use whatever you have on hand, but boards about 1 by 2 inches would be good.
The tools you will need are:
- A hand saw
- Chisel
- Mallet
- Sandpaper
- Some sort of bench or work surface to clamp your pieces down to
This jig is really easy to make and might not require much instruction beyond the materials needed and pictures, but basically you're just making a triangular wooden frame with a wooden peg 1 meter away from the base. For the jig in the picture, I added an extension to it to make clews for larger hammocks although the 1 meter distance is what most will require.
The first step is to create a wooden piece that has the shape of a hill basically. While you are threading the clew, the strings will lay on top of this shaped piece of wood, and will have their lengths altered by it. The strings in the middle of the clew will be longer because they are elevated more by the hill guide. Using this hill guide isn't technically necessary, but the end result will be more comfortable if you do. Having tighter strings on the edge of the clew puts more weight on the knotted bands on the edge of the hammock, taking weight off of the center and allowing it to open up under less tension.
To make this guide piece, just cut out 2 small rectangles from the edges to create two little feet that the board will be tied down with. After that use a hand saw (or table saw/bandsaw) to cut the 2 sloping edges of the guide. This picture shows 2 sets of lines: the red lines show where I made my cuts and realized that they were a little too shallow. The green lines show a better location for the cuts - none of this is too scientific so don't worry if it's slightly off.
The last step of creating this piece for me was to glue 2 small blocks to extend the width of the feet to give the whole piece more stability when upright.
Finished guide piece
The next step is to create the triangular frame itself. There is some room for play here, so just do what works best for the materials you're working with. The base of the clew jig should be about 4 feet wide at the bottom, and provide a point 1 meter from the center of that base to attach a wooden peg.
The small board at the top will just be used to support a horizontal crossbar from below while glue is drying
Glue/hammer a small horizontal board down that will hold the peg in the middle of the frame.
Make sure to clamp/otherwise weigh down pieces while the glue is drying
Now the last step to building the frame is to attach the base board with glue/nails. This is really straightforward, and afterwards all that's left is to drill a hole to accept the post at the top of the jig. It's super important to make sure that your post is in the exact center of the baseboard roughly 1 meter away, so make all of your measurements carefully.
Finally, just two small pieces remain: one is a short length of broom handle or something similar to pass through the loose loops on the end of the hammock - here I have a square dowel, which should be about the width of the base of the frame and the hill shaped string guide we made earlier.
The other is the small peg. I turned this one on my lathe, but any short length of round wood will do. To help hold the end of the clew strings in place it helps to have a slightly concave surface to the peg.
And that's all there is to do to get a clew jig ready for use! Hopefully before too long I'll have the tutorial for making the clew itself ready, so until then!
