amuckart

Have you tried a crank splitter?

I don't know where to get 'em but my experience of bags with fittings like that is that the proper name for them is 'useless junk'. On all of the bags I've seen with that style of handle fitting it's been a nasty flimsy bit of metal on the inside trying to make up for the fact that there isnt' enough substance in the actual lid of the bag for the handle to hold on to.

Do you have any pictures of the offending parts?

Thanks Kevin. I'm fairly sure I've got the right bobbins for this one, but I'll check. They certainly fit the bobbin case perfectly and the bobbin case fits the hook just fine. What was the clue you had the wrong bobbins in your Singers?

Hi all, I've got a couple of Pfaff model 34 wheel foot machines for closing shoe uppers. Both of them are missing the occasional stitch when running at speed, and one of them is pulling the bottom thread up in a big loop so there's an inch or so of it above the material I'm sewing. The two machines are slightly different, one has a standard drop feed and reverse, and the other has a wheel feed with no reverse but other than that they're the same. The machines are pretty old, but are still tight and the timing doesn't seem to be slipping. I am wondering if the hook/hook race is worn; the one with the drop feed there's a little more 'rattle' in the hook than I was expecting, but I don't know what it should be like when it's right. The points of the hooks on both machines seem to be in good condition. I can time a machine, but I've never been good at figuring out intermittent dropped stitches and I'm at a total loss as to what's causing the loops of lower thread on top of the work. Can anyone help me out with pointers as to what might be causing this? Unfortunately I didn't have my camera around when it was doing it and I had to cut the thread to keep working on the machine, but I'll get it to do it again and post pictures. Thanks.

Couple more points on these. Good luck finding needles. They're getting like hen's teeth these days. The good thing is you don't need many, you can resharpen 'em if you're careful and they just don't break unless something goes horribly horribly wrong. You need a good sharp point on the shuttle or it won't pick up the top thread, this can be a bit of a pain if the shuttle is worn. My two don't cycle right without tension on the top thread. I don't know if this is normal, but they both do it. The tension on the top thread pulls the takeup lever into the right position for the roller to move it. Without the thread tension the spring pulls it into a position where the roller sticks in the wrong part of the 'loop' bit of the takeup lever.

I've never made a shaving bag, but if I were going to do one like this my instinct would be to make the zip go all the way down to the ends to let it open more easily.

+1 to what Wiz said. Henry's da man for these. They're good machines, but can be a little fiddly to get going. Needles are a pain to find, so grab all the ones you come across and be real careful how you store them. Parts haven't been made for years, so the only way to get them is to get another machine, but not all Junkers are the same and the Pedersen's are different again. I have 2, and the plate from one won't fit the other, and there are other minor thread/part differences.

Casts are great for people like orthoticists and prosthetic engineers who are making a very specific formed surface to fit a part of the body, but not so great for lasts, because lasts aren't a model of a foot, they're are a model of the inside of a shoe which is quite different and very not-foot shaped in a lot of ways. You can take a foot cast and turn it into a passable last but it's not the best way to go. Feet are complicated mechanical structures that move and change shape and volume as you walk on them a shoe needs to accommodate that movement, either by stretching or by having space in the right places inside the shoe to let the foot move while conforming tightly to the parts of the foot that move less and that the shoe hangs from. If you made a shoe over a cast of the foot it wouldn't fit and would be quite painful to walk in unless it were made of lycra. It'd be like building a machine with absolute zero tolerances between moving parts. It wouldn't move. Pretty much everyone I've talked to, and every expert shoemaker I've read treats foot measuring and last making as an art more than a science. Golding and Koleff quantified the art and came up with general rules but there are subtleties in the exact tools a given maker uses and the exact way they use them that have flow on effects in how they make the patterns, shape the last and build the footwear. You can apply computer modelling and CNC technologies to making lasts but without someone driving those technologies who has a really profound understanding of the way a last relates to a foot the result won't be much good - as evidenced by the vast bulk of factory-made footwear today which in its attempt to fit everyone generally fits no-one, or "fits" by being so padded as to be useless (and bad for your knees, to boot). Most cordwainers don't make lasts from scratch - last making is a separate highly skilled trade in itself - but they do modify stock lasts to precisely fit given feet and the good ones at least will have a deep understanding of how a last shape relates to a given foot shape. Poor buggers like me who are learning to make 16th century shoes have to figure out how to make lasts themselves because there's no stock ones to modify

There are pictures of extant ACW-era prosthetics online. Have you looked at those to see how the prostheses of the period were done?

I get back problems and quite bad RSI, so the ability to adjust even a little bit up and down can make a big difference to me. I've been working on how to get four low-weight props synchronised so I can put them in the legs of my desk for that reason.

Oh, I'd have cam clamps to fix it in position, I was just thinking of the gas prop as a way to allow the height to be easily adjusted with weight on the table.

Oh man, now I really want it! Problem is I live in New Zealand, so getting it here would cost a fortune

I think machinehead has it right and the safety clutch has disengaged. The very last page of that PDF I linked to above has instructions on resetting it.

I'm jealous. That makes me wish I lived closer by so I could convince you to sell it to me

I'm working off general principles here. If there's someone out there with direct experience with this model of machine, they may be able to point you to more specific things that relate to this exact machine. That makes sense, yes. Can you feel any resistance in the mechanism when you do this? It helps to slip the belt off the flywheel when you test this. If it's all smooth but the hook just doesn't go round it sounds to me like the screw that holds it in place is completely undone. If there's 'chunks' of resistance it's probably still there, but loose. If this is the case you need to remove the hook (instructions are in the PDF I linked to above) and see what the screw looks like. If it isn't stripped and the thread it engages with isn't damaged, then it should be a fairly simple case of putting the hook back in and tightening the screw up. You'll probably have to re-time the machine again, but that isn't as difficult as it sounds. If nothing else it sounds like this machine will be a good learning experience (kinda like my 45k which still isn't back together but has taught me a lot). I'm pretty sure everyone has had these, not even Bob and Wiz were born knowing this stuff so be patient and you'll get it working eventually. If you want to learn how sewing machines work in a general sense, I'd recommend getting hold of an old domestic Singer, models 201, 66, 15 or 99 are good, and completely stripping and reassembling it. They're simple machines that pretty much only go back together one way and there's good information online about how to work on them, set the timing etc, and the principles are directly applicable to other machines, even big industrials.

I'm not specifically familiar with that machine, but they look right to me. I'd say the lower-left one in the picture is to stop the bobbin spinning around, and the upper right one in the picture is the hook that should pick up the top thread to build the stitch. If you remove the bobbin and the top thread and turn the machine over by hand is the hook turning? Have a look at the Singer Manuals there are manuals for various 153s in there. The quality isn't great but with the machine in front of you it's easy enough to figure out what's what. I don't know what sub-model you have, but the manual for the 153k101, 102, 103 and 154k101 has a section at the end for adjusters that is probably quite useful to you.

I get the impression you're fairly new to sewing machines? The basics of timing a machine are actually quite simple, and largely transferrable from machine to machine, so don't stress too much about that. Do you have pictures of the bobbin/shuttle area? When you say the bobbin won't turn, is it not rotating in the bobbin holder, or is the shuttle itself jammed?

Threads under the bobbin case shouldn't be a horrendously expensive problem to fix. Whip the bobbin case out and clean the birdsnest out. Can you see what caused it? Sounds like either the top tension is going wonky or the timing of the thread take up is off.

I gotta remember that one.

I don't see why it need necessarily be a boat anchor. if it uses needles different to the other 45ks then that might be an issue. Do you have any pictures of it? If it were me I'd buy it for the treadle table alone!

Hi Biggun Dr. Thanks for your ongoing help. I don't know for sure that it's a taper pin in the 'k58, but it is in the UFA and the 'k13s. I don't have my caliper to hand to tell you the end diameters, but laying it on the table and putting a steel rule on it it's obviously not a straight cylinder. As far as this particular pin is concerned, it's tight on the beam and rotates in the frame on the 'k58. Looking at the wear on the one I've knocked out of the 'k13 it's the same there too; there's longitudinal scratch marks on the centre third of the pin and the outer thirds are smooth. That's a good idea about the shim stock, I hadn't thought of that. The last thing I want to do is break the cast-iron frame of the machine. If I'm visualising things right with the C-clamp idea you're suggesting using it like a whackable bearing-puller, yes? If it helps scale your replies, I'd class myself as not stupid and basically mechanically competent, but I'm certainly not a machinist. I've stripped things like domestic treadle machines, a Pearson A1 add a couple of Junker & Ruh Sd.28s right back to individual screws and reassembled and timed them so they sew again, and I've taken my #6 Pearson down to minor sub-assemblies and reassembled it without a manual or leftover bits. I have basically no power tools beyond a dremel, a drill and a poxy little belt grinder I've adapted for sharpening. I have a hand-cranked drill press kicking around in the garage someplace but I've yet to set up a bench to put it on. I can forge things on the scale of small knives, but I'm not trained or practiced in fine work and I have no formal mechanical or engineering training, and the last time I touched a metal lathe was getting on for 20 years ago. I'm mostly clever enough to ask for help before I break things, and I know enough to have worked out that I need a much wider range of screwdriver bits than I currently have I'm also not bothered by replies suggesting things I've already thought of, if it's not immediately useful to me, then it might be to someone reading the archived thread later. All that said, I've a friend who's a volunteer steam engineer and tram driver at MOTAT who can put me in touch with real engineers who might be able to turn up small things in exchange for a case of beer if it's an interesting project.

Since getting a commercially made stand shipped to New Zealand is prohibitively expensive, and I can drive a welder, I've been contemplating making a stand for my 45k (once I've got the damn thing back together again, that is) An idea that's been stuck in my head for a while is building in the gas prop mechanism from an office chair to let me adjust the height easily. I figure if a gas prop can deal with my fat 110kg butt sitting on it it'll deal with pretty much any sewing machine out there, and they come in all sorts of heights.

I'd buy one! If I had the money that is. Unfortunately I spent it all on swords so I don't have an iPad I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'not fluent enough'. I can't comment on the technical quality, but to me it looks very clean and the design is detailed and leads the eye on an interesting path over the piece. My only suggestion would be to work out a way to make the cover work to prop the ipad up on a slight slope in landscape mode. This is by far the most common way I see people use them and is built into the standard Apple cases as well as most after-market ones. Unfortunately I can't for the life of me think how you'd do that without compromising the look of what you've made, which is quite beautiful.

Gordon, who has much more luck finding stuff on the 'net than I do found the exploded diagram of a model 29k and a parts chart for the 29U - the last version that Singer made, but it's fundamentally the same beast as all of the later model 29ks. This isn't the one I was thinking of, but it's close enough. 29U Parts Chart Page five of this pdf, part #8586 is the one that's giving me grief. 29K exploded Diagram Cheers.