amuckart

Thanks for that. Unfortunately that, along with all the other links that show up on a google search for the model number, is just the parts list, not a user manual. There's a service manual for a slightly different variant but it doesnt answer the things I'm still trying to work out.

Try colder water next time. What are you using for your ingredients?

I'm with Paul. Practice your hand sewing, concentrate on consistency and making sure the awl angle is the same every time and that the threads pass each other in the same relationship every stitch. By the time you've sewn a few metres concentrating on these things it'll get better. Trust me. My hand sewing was apalling when I started and is pretty reasonable even now when I'm out of practice. This is an art and it takes practice to get good and more practice to stay good.

Hi all, I've just acquired a Pfaff 441-R 755 driven roller foot/roller feed flatbed machine out of a shoe factory. It's got a needle positioning servo and is quite a step up from my old 34-5, though that still sews just fine. I've figured out most things, how to change stitch length, how to thread the bobbins etc and most of where I would need to hook up a driver for the thread trimming knife if I ever want that to work again/can figure out how to hook it to the control box on the motor. What I can't figure out for the life of me is where the oil goes! It's got a sump and a little oil gauge on the front, but I can't see where to put oil in. Also the thing I'm assuming is the oil pump isn't electrically connected, and the connector on the end of the wire is different to the available connectors on the Ho-Hsing servo motor it's equipped with. There are parts manuals for this machine all over the Internet, but nothing in the way of an operators or service manual. Can anyone help me out? Thanks.

That machine is a roller foot cylinder bed machine for sewing footwear. It is a clone of the Singer 17 class machine, there is also a version with reverse made by Seiko It has a roller foot and drop feed, it isn't a walking foot. The type is good for light leather of garment and shoe weight, but I don't know anything about the specific brands you've been looking at though.

Yup, that's a 331 system needle, same as is used in the Pearson No.6. They're scary big. There's enough groove for them to go through 25mm of leather and still throw a loop - and they used to come in sizes down to 160 which is awful thin for something that long!

Sharp is relative. It depends on what you're cutting and what you're cutting it with. Buy Leonard Lee's Book of Sharpening It'll teach you everything you want to know.

Not that I'm in any way significantly knowledgeable, but having machines that take each of the systems below, I'd back your last two off a notch and add one on the end: DDX1, 328: Medium. Up to 13mm depending on machine. Thread up to 415/6 cord 794, 7x3: Heavy. 5-21mm depending on needle and machine. Thread up to 514/8 cord 331: Very Heavy 5-25mm depending on needle and machine setup. Thread up to 514/8 cord I'm fairly sure 1000 system needles fit in somewhere between 794 and 331 but I've never actually encountered any. That's only for threaded needle machines. Needle & awl machines are another story entirely.

For hafts, get in touch with Dick Anderson at thornapple river boots and send him pictures of the awls you wants hafts for. He does the nicest shoemaking awl hafts in the business.

Thanks Steve, I'd be interested in pictures and the bearing-to-bearing measurement, if it's easy to get. Thanks.

I'm guessing you've worked this out already, but if you screw the winder to a piece of wood, or your table, and fix the tension unit from a regular industrial winder just behind it you can run the thread through that and get it working the way you need with only one person. It's also good to know that the neato powered winder Campbell-Randall sells works for Pearson #6 bobbins.

Darren, Any tips on how to manage that? I've found treadles are great but for slow speed stuff they're no patch on a servo because they need some good momentum to keep going and have penetration power. Cheers.

It's a scalpel handle, also known as a scalpel blade holder

What needle sizes are you using with those threads? If the needle is too small it won't reliably throw a loop for the shuttle to pick up

Email info@schmetz.com and ask them who the local distributor is where you are, they'll be able to point you in the right direction for needles. Campbell-Randall are a good one-stop shop fr needles and thread, and I imagine any of the vendors who advertise on here would be able to help you out.

You need a certain amount of slop in the shuttle race to allow the thread to pass around the shuttle. Make it too tight and you'll get thread breakage. What size of needle and thread are you using? What happens if you go up a needle size or down a thread size?

That's not actually a winder for a Randall, it's for a Pearson HM6. It's almost, but not complete. You've got yours set up to spool from the centre of a ball. Spooling off of a roll the roll would go on the bar at the back with a disc of cloth at either end, and a rubber disk with a small hole in it pushed onto the end of the bar. That setup would provide tension. Winding dry thread by hand, you would pass the thread over the top of the machine but not through the handle on the front of the wax pot. You tension the thread through your fingers and guide it onto the bobbin by hand at the same time. The manual advises having a soft piece of leather in your hand to stop getting burnt by the thread. I've sent you a PM about the winder too.

It's definitely not machine welded, the pictures might be hard to make out but in hand it is clearly a separate piece that is riveted in place on the blade.

that's normal sewing machine behaviour. You have to hold the threads so that the take up lever pulls the lowe loop tight.

I recently picked up an old Dixon plough Gauge on a local auction site for a pretty good price and when I got it I found its rather unlike either of the ones I have at the moment. The main difference is that the height of the roller is adjusted solely by a screw, there's no secondary fixture to hold it in place once it's height adjusted. The blade is the most interesting bit though. Instead of there being a milled slot in the blade there is a piece that has appears to have been forge welded from two parts, leaving a slot for the blade, and then riveted in place. I'm wondering whether the blade has been repaired by an enterprising owner at some point in the past or whether this is a really early way of making the slot. It would surprise me if this was a normal way of doing it since it's rather a labour intensive way of doing the job and I'd be surprised if the blade predates the use of a mill to cut the slot. If it's a repair, it's really rather well done.

There are some good books on making woodworking workbenches that go into the ergonomics of bench height in quite a lot of detail. The activities aren't all that dissimilar in terms of where you want your work located relative to your body. Scott Landis' The Workbench Book is one of the best ones. The Workbench Design Book: The Art and Philosophy of Building Better Benches by Christopher Schwartz is another good one. Lee Valley Tools has all the three best workbench books for sale.

The long thin tools are modelling tools, I think for clay, but they show up in leather tool collections a fair bit. The other tool looks like a thonging chisel to me.

Buy one without a motor and put a Quick Rotan servo on it. Just be prepared to pay as much for the motor as you did for the machine.

Hi Gregg, That's extremely useful to know, thank you. Do you know if the numbers themselves mean anything, or what the number before and after the colon means? I'll do that, thanks.

I've read a lot online here and in other places about how 331LR needles aren't made any more. I know Aaron Martin sell Chinese-made ones but I've seen some and haven't been impressed with the quality of the couple I handled. The shaft diameter is all wrong on the smaller needles (they're not necked down from 3mm wire). Given the difficulty of obtaining needles in a variety of sizes and my desire to keep my No.6 working for as many decades as I can I'm buying as many as I can get my hands on now, with the assistance of a very helpful local Schmetz rep. In the course of talking to them I've found that while the smaller sizes are almost impossible to get (180, for example is impossible to get from Schmetz any more) they are still manufacturing metric size 230 and the price from Schmetz is significantly less than it is from Aaron Martin or what people on ebay are asking for them. They also said that the minimum order for them to do a run of other sizes would be 8000 needles, which was actually a lot less than I was expecting. Admittedly that's a pretty huge outlay for a single person, but it's 80 people ordering a box of 100 each, and I'm sure there are more than 80 No.6 owners left in the world!