Spinner's Weasel

A spinner's weasel, also called a clock reel, is a mechanical device used to measure a length of yarn as it is wound. It is built as a spoked wheel connected through gears to a pointer on a marked face resembling a clock, with an internal mechanism that produces an audible pop once the set length has been wound. A common gear ratio of forty to one, with a reel circumference of two yards, produces an eighty yard skein after forty revolutions, and the pointer lets the spinner track progress toward that length while working. It is a more elaborate alternative to a plain swift, which has no gearing or popping mechanism, and to the simpler niddy noddy. The device's popping sound is cited as a possible source of the word weasel in the nursery rhyme Pop Goes the Weasel.