amuckart

You might want to experiment with reducing your presser foot pressure at well.

Most small sewing machine motors are universal AC/DC motors and can be reversed. The easiest way is to open the motor and swap the brush housings around and it should reverse the direction.

Is there a particular weight/type of leather you're interested in? Can you post pictures of what you're getting out of your machine at the moment? That might help get suggestions on what to adjust.

Glad my blog is useful 5-6mm isn't too difficult to turn at all provided you get the right stuff. Avoid sole bend, it's hard rolled and far too stiff for turnshoes. The stuff I have is "48 hour" tanned (normal 'vegetable' tan is 6-12 hours) and it's nicely flexible. I can't get any more though. Regular thick veg tan still turns easily.

I use 2.5mm veg tanned double shoulders and it works very well. I use 5-6mm veg for the soles, which is borderline too thin but works Ok.

It's a needle and awl machine. The biggest limitation of it is that it has a throat depth of about 4", so the shapes of things you can feed through it are quite limited. If you search the forums I think they've been discussed here before. Here's a video from Lisa Sorrell showing how it works.

It looks like an American straight needle stitcher to me.

A New Zealand site called TradeMe http://www.trademe.co.nz about four years ago.

Nice find Wiz. That looks like a really useful feature!

I don't know what the market is like where you are, but to put your budget in context, but here in New Zealand I bought a Pfaff 441 for NZ$250, and a Seiko STH-8BLD2 for NZ$300, both with motors etc. I had to replace the motors on the Seiko because it was set up for upholstery work and was much too fast for what I wanted but a new servo motor was $150.

What's your definition of "medium weight"? 6oz or 18oz? It's handy to be as specific as possible because my definition of "medium weight" coming at this from a different area of leatherwork might be very different to yours. In my book, 24oz is "medium" but if you're doing garment weight stuff then I suspect your definition of "medium" is a lot less than that. Are you particularly set on a Juki machine? They're good, but you pay a premium for that brand. There are older models of machine that will sew garment weight leathers really well that you can probably get for a lot less than $1000. That money might be enough to get you a second hand Seiko TE/TF-6, which are cylinder arm roller foot machines designed for lightweight leather sewing. The TF-6 is a left handed machine, meaning it's arm points to the right instead of to the left like a normal machine and the presser foot and feed are on the inside of the arm. This gives excellent visibility of the seam lines. Both can have a flat table attached. The TE/TF-6 are modern clones of the Singer 16 and 17 class machines. Another machine that's popular amongst people sewing things like boot tops and shoes is the Singer 31-15, which is a flat-bed roller foot machine. It's a straight-stitch only, and has no reverse, but there are modern versions that do. The Pfaff 441 (not to be confused with the Juki 441) is another flat bed roller foot machine for leather that can be had second hand. There's a post-bed version too, but I can't remember the model number. For someone working outside of a factory setting without maintenance staff, the advantage of machines like these compared to more modern self-lubricating direct-drive ones is that they are much simpler and far easier to service and unless you need really high production speeds they will probably serve you just as well. My recommendation would be to look at the advertisements on this site and talk to Techsew, Toledo Industrial, etc. about what you need and see if they have a machine that will do what you want inside your budget. I've also heard very good things about Melanie Machine Co. in Ohio.

I didn't, but google found it quickly enough. Thank you for the pointer. It looks like a rework of the Juki engineers' manual.

When you say "lambskin" do you mean wool on, or thin lamb leather? The sort of machine you need to sew garment weight leather and the sort of machine you need to sew thicker leather are quite different. I think that for lighter weight leathers a roller foot machine (ideally with a roller feed) is a good idea. A post or cylinder bed machine will allow you to sew complex 3D shapes as well as flat things. For heavier leathers, you'll want a walking foot machine. For medium weight work a Seiko STH-8 or Consew 206 (both clones of the Singer 111) is a good bet. They're common, easy to get feet and parts for, and reliable. I don't know if they can be adapted to sew thin soft leathers like lambskin though.

Mostly, but not 100%. Interestingly adjusting it in accordance with Steve's video did not work. I don't know why, I thought Cobra and Cowboy machines were mechanically identical. The video gave me what I needed to stare at the mechanism while cycling the machine which let me work out what bits did what. Along with the engineering manual I've got the machine sewing cleanly forward and backwards into the same holes but the stitch length is out by about -10-15% across the board. At 11mm I get just under 10mm stitches, and it stops feeding by a needle width at about the 3-4mm setting. I think I know why this is but I need to play with it some more to be sure. The correct point for zero on my machine is the centre of the adjustment bar.

I think this video of Cobra Steve going over the whole machine with all its adjustments makes a useful addition to this thread:

I was wrong. I found Cobra Steve's video and it showed me most of what I needed. Thanks for the pointer Constabulary!

This great video from Cobra Steve answers the question

None taken. It was a calculated risk, and one I'm happy with. I'm not a professional who needs the machine for production work and I fix machines for fun so sinking time into getting it sorted isn't an issue.As it was I got the machine with a full set of feet & plates, for less than half what it would have cost me to import a machine from the USA. That's thousands of NZ$. For that money I'm willing to spend some time sorting it out and deal with a certain amount of mucking around with the local importer. I'm setting the machine up from scratch so I'm a bit beyond the basic tension and stitch length stuff :-)

The machine has never been properly adjusted. I got it straight from China, and mostly got it going back when I got it, then I got sick and couldn't work on it for ages. I'm getting back to it now and starting from scratch because it was never quite right. There should be one correct position, irrespective of the way the particular machine is setup otherwise the max stitch length in forward/reverse won't be correct. Having stared at this for a while now I'm going with the centre of the bar, not the top. Too late, but thanks anyway I think there are a couple of reasons the question might not have been answered yet. It's not a trivial set of adjustments to make, and it's part of the setup that resellers do when they get the machines from China to make sure they're working just right when they go out the door, and that's a major part of their value-add proposition. That's pretty much right, but the wedge is rounded and not terribly accurate. I've run with the "screw the adjustment in as far as it'll go and that's zero" approach, which seems to be working for now.

I've searched the forum and can't find an answer to this. My 441 isn't sewing as well as I want so I'm going back to basics and trying to tune it up from scratch. What I need to know is what order to approach the adjustments in. There are multiple adjustments in the engineer's manual that say they affect the stitch length relative to the markings on the machine or that they make the forward and reverse stitches different lengths. The problem I'm running into is that I seem to get into an endless cycle of setting one according to the manual, then adjusting something else and making it wrong again. Is there a specific order that adjustments should be done in to stop this happening? Thanks.

I'm trying to get my 441 clone to have an accurate stitch length and sew in the same holes backwards and forwards. It only does this for some lengths. I understand how to make the adjustment, but I'm curious as to what the correct position for the stitch length lever is at the zero point. Should the middle of the lever align with the mark, or should the top of the lever? The lever is pretty chunky and imprecise but I'd like to be able to accurately set a specific stitch length so I can pattern things so the stitches end up exactly at the corners. This also applies to the max stitch length end, what part of the bar should align with the 11mm mark? Is this correct Or this: Thanks.

I can't speak for Tor, but that's what I was asking about. The Ferdco machines had this part and they are described in the patents which I squirrelled out a while ago and listed in this post http://leatherworker.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=41581&p=259182 The patents were filed in 1993 and have lapsed, so my hope is that the other clone manufacturers will now start making and supplying these parts. Thanks.

I would also love to get a copy of this manual. Thank you.

Can you clarify what you mean by needle guide, is it a part under the needle plate that replaces the feed dog like in the Ferdco patents? If it is, where did you get it? Thanks.

Watch this video and see how many different machines get used for different operations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkvFBF4xT3o