Gayle Mill, Mill Lane, Gayle, Hawes (2026)

02/06/2026

A follow up to last week’s bearing discussions, we’ve now fitted grease cups to both of these bearings to make greasing them easier.

Be assured that in this as with any other work we carry out, we haven’t altered or damaged the bearings in any way (a close fitting tube with a bit of packing and some locktite makes an adequate seal) so it’s easy enough to remove the grease cups in the future.

Next job is to soak up the pool of oil on the floor underneath the bearings - a good sign that the oil previously used wasn’t doing much good!

Living in hope that this week’s rain will give us a bit more water to use - we’ve been struggling to demonstrate the machinery recently.

Gayle Mill is open on Thursdays from 10am until 4pm with guided tours every hour on the hour from 10am until 3pm.

25/05/2026

We’ve been looking at our bearings at Gayle Mill recently. Most of the bearings are simple split plain bearings like these, and some of them are showing some significant signs of wear. They’ve been in there for up to 140 years so I suppose it’s understandable…

Several of our volunteers have investigated this at quiet times, and we seemed to be seeing inconsistent results. One of us would try a spare bearing and say that it would fit, then somebody else would say it doesn’t fit. Confusion all round!

We finally identified the cause of the confusion last week. The main drive shaft is in three parts, and each part is a different diameter! The shaft at the turbine is 2 1/8”. The shaft going along the mill under the floor is 2”. The length in between is not any standard diameter known to mankind, it measures at 54.3mm which is not a standard size in either metric or imperial measurements!

We’re probably going to have to replace some of these bearings soon - the wear is quite visible in the pictures, maybe 2mm or so. For now, though, while we work out what to do, we’re thinking we may start greasing them rather than oiling them - oil just runs straight out onto the floor but hopefully heavy grease will stay in there better.

Gayle Mill is open on Thursdays from 10am until 4pm with guided tours every hour on the hour from 10am until 3pm.

19/05/2026

Gayle Mill in the 1980s. Do you think you could write a post about these pictures? Then why not have a go….

We are always looking for new volunteers to work with us at Gayle Mill. There’s loads of jobs to be done, and nowhere near enough of us to do it all.

You may think of the job as being tour guiding or repairing machinery, but that’s only a small part of it. We need new updated brochures and information signs, we need better advertising, gardening is always going on, along with maintenance, historical research, keeping and updating our inventory of equipment and paperwork, meeting and greeting, tidying and cleaning, even writing Facebook posts!

You’ll never hear any of us saying “that’s my job” or “that’s not my job”. We all just muck in and get on with whatever needs doing.

If you think you can help us with any of these things, why not get in touch? Send us a message or come and visit on any Thursday.

Gayle Mill is open on Thursdays from 10am until 4pm with guided tours every hour on the hour from 10am until 3pm.

12/05/2026

A call out to the Isle of Man Motor Museum which I visited last week while on holiday there. An absolutely fantastic museum with an amazing collection of historic and unusual cars, motorbikes and other motor vehicles.

One display which caught my eye is this recreation of a workshop with belt driven engineering machinery. It looks remarkably like Gayle Mill’s workshop! Well done guys in recreating the look so well.

If you’re ever over in North Yorkshire and want to take a look at our genuine water powered victorian machinery in its original location and still working, please come and visit us. I’m sure you’ll enjoy your visit to us as much as I enjoyed my visit to you!

Gayle Mill is open on Thursdays from 10am until 4pm with guided tours every hour on the hour from 10am until 3pm.

28/04/2026

An early start at Gayle Mill last Thursday to get these jobs out of the way before we let the water in.

We’ve tried several approaches to stop the plug in the launder from leaking (yes, it does have a plug - and a chain) - silicon was the last one, which worked for a while but then came loose when the plug was removed. Our latest attempt is pipe insulation wrapped around the edges.

While the plug was being fixed muggins here went for a crawl underneath the launder (don’t worry, I was wearing a harness) and retrieved the corrugated metal sheets that stop the leaks from eroding the bank - these had been slipping down and would be in the beck before very much longer. I dragged all the stones higher up the bank to give a more level surface, then laid the sheets out and wedged them in place.

The new seal has worked well so far, the leaks are fairly minimal and are now landing on the metal sheets so won’t erode the bank.

A nice quick job, finished ready to get the water running and welcome the first visitors at 10am.

Gayle Mill is open on Thursdays from 10am until 4pm with guided tours every hour on the hour from 10am until 3pm. We’re still on the lookout for new volunteers, please give us a shout if you feel you could help.

20/04/2026

A special day at Gayle Mill last week, our 1920s turbine is back together again!

Having reassembled the control vanes into the side of the turbine, we lowered the whole assembly into the pit and (with a bit of pushing and shoving) got it back in place on the turbine body. We then tightened it into place, fitted the bearing and the control rods, tightened the packing glands and let the water back in.

Success! Well, mostly. The turbine ran fine, spun up the dynamo and lit the lights, and with the new cush drive is much quieter than before.

Unfortunately we still don’t seem to be able to properly turn the turbine off fully (the problem we’ve had from the start). Although it is possible to force the vanes closed using the control wheel, this feels to be putting a lot of strain on the mechanism and if we carry on doing this it will probably result in another broken vane fairly quickly.

We’ve got a few more checks to carry out, but our suspicion right now is that one of the vanes has become twisted over the years and is not aligned properly. The only way to confirm this for sure is to remove the side again and assemble it on the bench where we can see what’s going on inside.

Since the summer season is fast approaching, and we want to be able to demonstrate the turbine for tours, we’ll probably leave it alone for now and control it with the stopcock, then look at stripping it down again later in the year when things quieten down.

So not a complete success, but a considerable improvement on the past, and once again our grateful thanks to all the people who helped us to get this historic machine apart, repaired and back together again.

Gayle Mill is open on Thursdays from 10am until 4pm with guided tours every hour on the hour from 10am until 3pm.

13/04/2026

Gayle Mill needs you!

We are a very small group of volunteers who keep Gayle Mill running. Opening every Thursday, we run tours, we maintain and repair the machinery, and we maintain the building and the grounds. We do this because we all care deeply about this old and historic building and we want to keep it active and working for future generations.

We’re shortly going to lose two of our volunteers who are moving away from the area, and another has let us know of plans to move later in the year. We’re desperately in need of new volunteers to help our cause.

If you’ve got an interest in history, old machinery or old buildings and are free on Thursdays to help out with tours or repairs and maintenance, please get in touch. Come and visit us at the Mill on any Thursday, message us here or email on [email protected] - we’d love to hear from you!

Oh, you want to know about the pictures? Next step in repairing the turbine, and a unique opportunity to see the control vanes and really understand how they control the flow of water into the turbine. The repaired vane is visible at the right.

Gayle Mill is open on Thursdays from 10am until 4pm with guided tours every hour on the hour from 10am until 3pm.

07/04/2026

Bits and pieces jobs at Gayle Mill while we wait for the correct size gland packing to arrive to seal the turbine joints. Firstly, we made a new gasket for the main turbine casing, using some rather snazzy polka dot wrapping paper to make a template.

Secondly, the handle our old faithful rake (the one Guy Martin used to clear out the launder) finally gave up the ghost, so we had to make a new one. One of our extremely accomplished woodworking volunteers gave us a master class in tapering the handle with a plane so it was a snug fit in the head. It’s a good job I didn’t try, I can’t even sharpen a pencil. The rake lives again!

Gayle Mill is open on Thursdays from 10am until 4pm with guided tours every hour on the hour from 10am until 3pm.

31/03/2026

A Cushy Job….

While the Gayle Mill electrical turbine is apart being fixed, we thought we’d take a look at the drive to the dynamo. This is a cush drive (or doughnut drive) where a rubber disk transmits the power and allows a small amount of flex to reduce the jolting as the turbine and dynamo spin up. The two drums you can see are not connected directly - instead a rubber disk sits in between them with bolts alternately connecting to each drum.

Unfortunately as you can see the rubber disk has disintegrated around the bolts so there was no cushioning at all, just the rattle of the bolts against the drums.

Fitting a new disk is not as easy as it sounds, you need to be able to separate the drums so fixing this properly would require moving either the turbine or the dynamo.

Instead we came up with an alternative approach, we made six bolts with rubber blocks on them as seen in the fourth picture. These bolted alternately into each of the drums with the rubber fitting in the larger hole in the other drum.

Now there is no rattle in the drive at all, but the rubber allows a small amount of flex to cushion the drive. The nuts are nyloc but the bolts are wire wrapped as well (like the originals) to make sure they stay tight.

As with all such alterations we make, we will of course keep the original parts so they can be replaced if the turbine is ever moved in the future.

We’re back to summer opening times now, so Gayle Mill is open on Thursdays from 10am until 4pm with guided tours every hour on the hour from 10am until 3pm.

23/03/2026

Before and after…

Once we’d stripped down Gayle Mill’s 1920s turbine, we found one of the control vanes was broken, and another was bent and twisted. Both would need some serious repair work on them - way beyond our abilities to fix.

We passed them to Dave at Stainmore Railway Company who has done an absolutely magnificent repair job on both of them. Dave, our thanks to you for your help, words can’t express just how pleased we are with them.

We’ve got to replace the gland packing around the vanes and finish cleaning off the old gasket and make a new one, but hopefully within the next couple of weeks we’ll be able to get the turbine back together and running again.

Gayle Mill is open on Thursdays from 10am until about 4pm with guided tours every hour on the hour from 10am until 2pm. From the beginning of April we will be running 3pm tours again.

Gayle Mill

02/06/2026

25/05/2026

19/05/2026

12/05/2026

28/04/2026

20/04/2026

13/04/2026

07/04/2026

31/03/2026

23/03/2026

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