First Look At The New Lojan Flex Rigid Heddle Loom

This week has been very exciting as I have been very lucky to have a sneak peek at the new Lojan Flex Rigid Heddle Loom.

The Lojan Flex is a new loom available from April 2025 and it can be either a rigid heddle loom, a 4 shaft loom or 8 shaft loom. You can order a conversion kit to transform it between these options.

Loes at Lojan let me try out one of the final pre-production looms to see what I thought of it and so far it's really great. The Flex I have tried is the 50cm version and it is also available in 30cm width.

The first thing I had to do when it arrived was wax it as the wood was untreated. I used the Lojan Beeswax Polish for this and it was really easy to apply and quick to dry. I am proud of myself for doing this as usually I am too impatient and just want to get a new loom built.

As you can see from the image above it does not come in too many parts and it was relatively straight forward to build.

I did also get the stand for the loom too and again this was a simple build and really useful.

As you can see from the images it is a sturdy loom and the stand is also really sturdy too. The stand does fold flat easily when the loom is not on it.

The reed on the Flex is the part which makes it different from the other rigid heddle looms we stock as it comes with segments to make the reed up. This means that you just need 1 or 2 reed frames and then the sections for the different sett sizes (available in 2.5 dpi, 5 dpi, 7.5 dpi, 10 dpi, 12.5 dpi and 15 dpi) to put in it. It also means that it's very easy to mix and match sett sizes in one reed too. I did order all of the different sizes up and will be playing about with these but for this first weave I stuck with the 7.5 dpi segments as that's what comes with the loom.

For warping it up I kept the loom on it's stand and had it resting against my handily very big kitchen table.

The Flex comes with a warping peg and I positioned it up so that I'd do 2 sections of warp for a 12" scarf. I find this gives better tension for winding on the warp onto the loom.

Using The Croft DK by West Yorkshire Spinners I warped up the first section. The Flex comes with 2 extra bits of Texsolv cord that can be connected to the screw at the top of the heddle block and I then wrapped it around the metal apron rod to keep it in place.

This is really handy and stops the apron rod from moving about.

Once I got the first warp section measured I removed it from the warping peg and tied a knot in the end of it then moved the warping peg to the next position. If you are doing this method do make sure that you tie the warp yarn onto the apron rod before removing it from the peg or it will mess up the tension.

Above shows the winding the warp around the peg completed before removal from the second peg.

To help with winding on the warp the Flex comes with plastic strips. These are actually quite good to use as warp separators as they didn't bend that much and have a good strength in them.

The heddle block on the loom is well designed as the reed stays happily in the neutral position for warping and threading up. The metal apron rods are also good and strong and help give a good tension.

Now the loom was warped up it was weaving time!

Weaving is so nice and smooth on this loom and that has a lot to do with the reed and the heddle block. Below is the the up position with the top of the heddle in the block.

This is the down position:

And this is what a good size the shed is:

The weaving movement from placing the heddle in the up and down position is so nice and smooth and the reed beats really well. 

Tension on the loom is also great thanks to the strong pawls and ratchets on the side.

The green end stoppers on the reed do keep the segments firmly in place while weaving too as they slide in to the edge of the end segments.

It really was a pleasure to weave away on this loom. I did keep it level on the stand which is different to what I normally do with rigid heddle looms as other makes do make the loom tilt forward a bit. Having it level was fine to weave at and does make me think it might make it easier to use a boat shuttle on it when using finer threads.

I got to the end of the warp and could still squeeze the weft throw just with the metal apron rod nearly at the back of the reed.

I probably could have squeezed a bit more through but at this point I was done and wanted to see how the cloth turned out, and it turned out like this:

It's a nice lightweight wool scarf and I love the colours as it reminds me of the fields that surround out house.

The weave has also turned out reasonably balanced which I am happy with as I did have it under strong tension on the loom which worked for this project. 

Now the first warp is off my Flex I can't wait to get a new one on which will either be cotton or bamboo as I want to see how the tension will be with these, which I think will be fine due to the extra beams at the front and the back of the loom. I'm also interested to work out how much warp and cloth it will hold as there is a lot of space on the cloth and apron beams.

I hope you have found this post useful and if you have any questions about the Flex then feel free to email me info@weftblown.com or leave a comment below.