amuckart

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!

Hi all, I'm hoping someone on here can help me. I'm trying to get my head around CANU needle notation, but I can't find any documentation anywhere on what the numbers mean. Does anyone have a reference to the notation or an explanation of what the fields mean that they can share? Thanks.

Wiz linked to Puritan's site in another thread and I got to looking at their various NS and OS models. I'm guessing that NS = New Style and OS = Old Style. I've also been reassembling my 1919 Singer 45k25, which I had soda blasted and got to see as bare iron. The casting on that is the most flawless piece of cast iron I've ever set eyes on. Looking at things like the CB2500/Ga5-1 modern versions of the 45k, and the "New Style" Puritans compared to the old 45ks and "Old Style" Puritans got me wondering where have the aesthetics in these machines gone? The old style Puritans are beautiful and to my eye no less functional than the horrible chunky "New" style castings. The pattern makers who made the patterns for machines like the old Puritans and 45ks had probably forgotten more about efficient and functional patternmaking for iron casting than most people know these days. The GA5 head looks like a 6 year old's play-doh version of a sewing machine compared to a 45k. What's driven the loss of aesthetic in modern machines? Have we just lost the generation of people who could make something functional that also looked good?

Just my opinion, but don't touch this. Rebuild one from new leather. That holster has history and anything you do to it will destroy that. Unless these things are common as mud, just remake one.

Here's how I do it. Look for local apiarists for beeswax. Look for traditional paint suppliers, or rodeo supply for rosin. Sap and rosin are different. Rosin is basically sap with a bunch of the volatiles boiled off. Sap itself is way way too soft and sticky.

You can probably get a better leather machine for the money. 7-31s are better for heavy fabric sewing than leather and the flat bed will limit you. Set your budget then contact the vendors who advertise on here and tell them what you've got to spend and what you want to make and you'll come out with something better.

#6 Pittman rods are easy, they're just straight. It's the shaped A1 pittmans I need pictures of.

Hi all, I'm looking for good pictures of a pitman rod for a Pearson & Bennion/BUSM A1 treadle machine. I need to make a pair and I'd like to get the shape right. Cheers.

This probably isn't useful, but I'm really glad I'm not the only person who's encountered this with this class of machine. My 441 clone does it too and it's driving me nuts because it's the last adjustment/tuneup I can't get my head around having taken the gamble of buying a factory-direct clone (it's a Cowboy, but without Bill's magic touch). As far as I can tell the thread is catching on the shuttle somewhere, there's a distinct noise it makes when this happens. It's not a timing thing though, the timing is perfect on my machine in forward and reverse. I am starting to suspect it's a defect in the actual shuttle itself, but I'll be really interested in other responses to the problem.

Do you have pictures of what's going on, and of the plate on your machine? Too much top tension, or a threading problem. Unthread the whole machine, and re-thread it following Steve's video on youtube. If that doesn't help, back the top tension right off until the bobbin threads are pulled up to the top, then tighten the top tension up until they dissappear but don't reappear on the bottom. This happens when you've missed threading the thread through the guide right on the needle bar so the thread's coming in at an angle from the last guide on the head of the machine. This is what pulls the needle and bends it. There's a little guide on the needle bar above the needle that the thread goes through to stop this. Been there, done that. Have a look at Steve's threading video on youtube and you'll see the bit I mean, it's the very last step before you thread the actual needle. Don't give up, nobody was born knowing how these things work.

I've used aerosol brake cleaner on many machines without a problem. The only way I can see it would promote corrosion is because it totally strips all surface oils off, so it pays to wipe exposed metal down with a non-drying light oil afterwards (or just spray the whole thing with syntex and deal with the drips). I would run far, far, away from any water-based cleaner. You'll never get the damn thing dry before it starts rusting, and you'll need to soak the whole thing in WD-40 to displace any moisture you can't get at. Kerosine is the other traditional sewing machine cleaner, but several cans of brake cleaner are probably a lot cheaper than enough kero to completely submerge the machine for a week.

Sorry man, I didn't mean to put you down. Nobody was born knowing this stuff!