I bought a no name Chinese leather patching machine that’s clearly modeled after the singer 29k (and cobra class 29-18). It sews but seems to have a few issues, all of which could be related to each other.
1. The hand wheel becomes hard to turn for a section of a full rotation, from 10 o’clock to 1 o’clock, corresponding to from after the needle goes into the leather and presser foot starting to lift to presser foot comes back down. There’s a lot of resistance and some times I need 2 hands to turn the hand wheel. The foot is hard to lift in the cycle.
2. I’m trying to adjust the foot lift using that wing nut in the back but it’s not working. The position of the nut within the groove is furthest from the machine, which theoretically is the lowest lift/clearance. However, the actual foot lift is quite high. I’m not able to reduce the lift because the nut is already at the farthest end of the groove. Yet I am not able to increase the lift either - if the nut is moved closer to the machine in the groove, when the foot lifts during the cycle, at the hardest-to-turn portion mentioned in #1, the nut is forced back to the furthest position of the groove. It’s like the foot lift is already set to the max and can’t be increased, yet because the nut is already hitting the furthest position of the groove, the lift can’t be reduced either. So the end result is the machine only has 1 lift height, the max.
Maybe #2 is the reason for #1?
I am curious how the foot lift adjust mechanism works. What should I check to trouble shoot? I’d like to try reducing the lift and see if that makes the hand wheel cycle smoother when the foot lifts.
3. For single 29k machines, can they do darning? Meaning sewing with the foot up and using the thread pressure plates at the front of the machine for needle thread? For my knock off machine, at some point within one turn of the hand wheel, the lift lever actually automatically gets pushed down which drops the foot down. So it can’t sew with foot up, aka, can’t darn.
again, I wonder if #1-3 are all related.
Any ideas what’s happening?
thanks!
