If you read the last post, you know I love my sewing machine. But as much as I love it, I hate when it (or any other machine) isn’t working quite right. I find it sooooo frustrating. I don’t have as much time as I’d like to just sit at the machine sewing my own things which means that when I do, I want it to just work.
So you can imagine, this wasn’t making me real happy:
That’s only seven of the eleven needles that snapped on Saturday afternoon. I reloaded the bobbin, dropped and lifted the feed dogs, reloaded the bobbin again, trying to figure out just what was making it happen over and over and over again. It was nearly every time I hit the backstitch and sometimes, even when I was just going through a bunch of layers. I couldn’t figure it out and was getting more irate with the stupidity of wasting so much time on changing needles. Finally I ran out of needles and just gave up.
Sunday afternoon, the fellow I bought the machine from came over to see what the problem could be. Come to find out, the 1/4″ foot I bought from him didn’t have a long enough space for the needle and when I was back stitching, it was moving the needle just enough to come down and slam into the foot.
He took a little Dremel and drilled that slit back a little further and -bam- it worked just fine. (Who knew you could do that?!)
I also had him fix the presser foot; it was just to low to effectively shove 8 layers of fabric under. Yeah, that camera bag has some serious layering going on. 😉
xo, t!
i understand your frustration and anger! great fix by the way!
Well, I thought it was fixed. Went to sew last night and dealt with the same issue when it was on thicker fabric. It’ll do a couple layers, but two layers plus Peltex made it break a needle. Then four layers of linen broke another. There was no way to even slowly walk it through eight layers. Another four needles down. I’m so unhappy about this.