As mentioned yesterday, I had a toolspiration yesterday. Here's the one I found! It's a rope machine about 4" a side.
I relatively often have an occasion where I hand-twist a length of decorative rope using embroidery floss or crochet thread. This is fine when I'm doing two ply, but much less fine when I'm doing 3[1]; it's much harder to get into a rhythm of rolling a strand one way while twisting it the other, grabbing the next strand, and repeating with more than two for me. Enter these guys: they introduce the twist needed to force the rope to twist around itself in short order!
I am... not very good yet (the outcome is overtwisted for my liking, and thus too stiff) but it's so mindboggling fast to make a ~8" length it shouldn't take me too long to get the knack. I will say that the spinny bit for your anchor point is... not great as a 3D printed snap fit object and likely also limiting me somewhat. I'll probably ask my FiL for a fishing swivel; I can't imagine he doesn't have a few laying around. I'll also probably print a different tool; the Classic Top I printed is for four strands and works, but is a bit much for the size of rope I'm making.
Here's the files if anyone is curious: original
I used the more efficent gears (I don't actually know if they are but they do spin them little hooks good) and the hole size of the tighter tolerance plates of the remix as a guide for adding xy hole offset on the triangular plates. I also shrunk everything by 50% cuz smol tool for smol ropes
and three is of course superior for aesthetic reasons ↩︎