History of AVL
AVL derives its heritage from the designs and inspiration of Jim Ahrens (1906-2000). Mr. Ahrens, originally a mechanical engineer by trade, started designing looms in the 1930s. After World War II, along with his first wife, he became a production handweaver and owner-operator of a weaving school, contract weaving shop and retail establishment in Oakland, California.
Later, in the early 50s, Jim worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the textile research laboratory in Livermore, CA. In the mid-1960s, he began designing a radically different loom that combined the best parts of handweaving with the knowledge he had gained during his years working in the industry.
In 1973, Jim was introduced to Pat McGaw, who was the director of the Pacific Basin School of Textiles in Berkeley. She ordered ten looms from Jim, who, because he was then in his late sixties, needed help to build them. In 1977, he joined forces with Jon Violette, a cabinet maker and Ms. McGaw's brother to form a new company called Ahrens & Violette Looms. The rest, as they say, is history.
The A & V Dobby Loom was an instant hit. Indeed, the entire notion of a "production" hand loom was a good idea whose time had come.
Birth of the Compu-Dobby
In early 1982, the company made another breakthrough. This time, the inspiration came from another source - Silicon Valley - where personal computers were just starting to make big headlines.
Management at AVL (the name had been shortened in early 1982) quickly realized that the dobby mechanism is essentially a mechanical computer. The "inputs" are all either 1's or 0's - in other words, the harness is either up or down. It was a relatively easy jump, at least conceptually, to make an electronic dobby with solenoids instead of wooden bars and pegs.
However, we still needed software. In stepped Tim Trudel of Fullerton, California, a highly-trained computer engineer at Hughes Aerospace, who along with wife, Dori, was an avid weaver. Tim produced our first software, Generation II, for the Apple II computer. It featured 32K of memory, ran in black and white on cassette tape, and was a sensation. The first AVL Compu-Dobby Loom appeared at the Seattle Convergence in July, 1982.
Since then our software line has grown exponentially. Software is written for AVL in the four corners of the earth, but principally in San Francisco, Syracuse, France, and Oslo, Norway, where our good friend and colleague, Bjørn Myhre (author of WeavePoint) resides.
In The Years Since
In the years since, AVL has moved forward on a number of fronts. In the early 90's we introduced a couple of new looms that greatly expanded our reach. First came the Professional Dobby Rug Loom, the world's first commercially available hand-operated dobby rug loom. The AVL Rug Loom was immediately recognized for its ruggedness and singular capacity to give rug weavers great complexity with the simplicity of a dobby. The AVL Rug Loom has continued to evolve; we recently sent an all-steel fifteen foot weaving width version to South America.
Next came automation. After years of weavers asking for a fully automated version of the AVL Production Dobby Loom, we finally did it in 1993 with the advent of the Industrial Dobby Loom (IDL). The IDL is a pneumatic loom whose functions are fully controlled by a Programmable Logic Controller and PC.
But that's not all. By the late 90s, in conjunction with the world-famous weaver Ann Sutton of the UK, we developed the Studio Dobby Loom, a small-scale version of the standard AVL; but this one is geared specifically toward design studios and educational institutions.
Next came an even smaller loom: the Workshop Dobby Loom, also known as The California Traveler. This little gem was developed to take to conference and workshop. Fully portable, it uses the smallest dobby around.
All this time, AVL had been working on its own version of the jacquard loom. Jacquards date back to 1803, but our development, though laborious, hasn't taken quite that long. AVL engineers do feel honored, though, to be walking in Monsieur Jacquard's footsteps. The AVL Jacquard uses modules of 336 hooks (one-quarter of the classic 1,344 hook head). Unlike the original, our system does not use wooden boards, but rather a sophisticated system of minute solenoids and valves to control each hook.
More recently, in the middle of 2002, we introduced the A Series ("A" in honor of Mr. Ahrens), a modern update of the original A & V design.