I Need To Move A Loom From North Carolina

I have a strange challenge in my life at the moment. There is a 60" AVL production dobby loom waiting for me in North Carolina. I need to move it to Oregon in the cheapest and easiest way possible.

Here's my current plan:
- Take Greyhound to Greensboro (3 days)
- Rent a UHaul, buy packing materials and drive to the small town where the loom is
- Break it down and pack it up, ready to ship (1 day)
- Drop off the packages at Greyhound, return the UHaul
- Pay for Package Express service for 500 lbs of loom parts
- Get onto the same bus as the packages and come with them across the country (another 3 days)

So, that's the best I can come up with - 7 days and $1,000. I'll be leaving the third week of October if I can't come up with a better idea.

I've looked at renting trucks, $3,000 with gas. PODS, $2,500. I've got an ad on Craigslist in Asheville, and a website called Coffee and Power. I contacted a friend who was teaching at Penland at the time. I've put the word out to all of my friends on Facebook, but still have no better idea of how I could move that loom with less time investment, less money, or both, while still maintaining some level of security in its delivery.

Do you have any ideas? Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.

Know of someone with a covered truck or van who's driving out to the northwest anyhow? I'll give them the $1,000 to pay for their time and gas and meet them anywhere between San Francisco and Seattle. Got any other ideas?

Why do I need another loom?

Well, it's a complicated answer. I don't really. I NEED another beam and warping station so that I can reduce the downtime between beams. In the newly forming collective, there are others who can help with weaving once I get the beam ready, the wefts chosen, and the garment order decided. They cannot help with the actual winding or tying on... yet.

Since it takes me 7-9 days for this part of the process, that's a bunch of time that they are looking for something to do. If I could wind and tie on while the previous beam was being woven, it would save a TON of time. The cost of buying a beam and building a warping station was less than this loom, even with the transportation costs included.

With a full second loom, I could even weave garments in the new color. Right now, for instance, there's a time crunch in the studio because we're running low on blue cloth and need to finish the green and prepare the loom for the blue batch before we can have any. The end result is that there will be no blue ruanas for the next 3 shows. If, however, there was a second loom, it would pay for itself by the end of October in the blue cloth alone.

It's too late for this time crunch, but if I can get it here, it will prevent time crunches like this in the future.

In the worst case, I'll do the Greyhound trip with my battery and inverter so I can get caught up on bookkeeping during my 6 days sitting on a bus. And, If I spend my time studying Welsh vocabulary, I should be pretty good by the time I get back!