amuckart

Oil it lightly and leave it in the sun.

It's a Rafflenbeul outsoling machine. They seem to be more common in Europe than elsewhere. I desperately want one but I've never seen one in AU or NZ. As with most outsolers, they're good for boot and shoe soles, but basically useless for anything else because they have such a tiny throat depth. Googling for "Rafflenbeul doppelmaschine" will get you some info on them but the vast majority of it is in German.

You have the feed dog for crepe soles, it's a different unit to the channel knife. I have the same on my one. Somewhere that sells needles should also be able to sell you a channel knife. I believe the channel knife also acts somewhat like an awl, there is a protruding bit on the left of the knife that aligns with the needle during the feed stroke, which makes a lot of sense in the context of hard outsole leather. This post at the Crispin Colloquy shows pictures of the channel knife.

If you loctite the screw in, what do you do when you need to change feed dogs? Do you have to clean out the hole again?

It's an old Frobana/Gritzner. It looks filthy, but complete as far as I can tell from the pictures. I have a manual for it, PM me your email address and I'll send you a copy. It won't sew anything under about 1/4"/6mm thick. It's designed for outsoling shoes and boots, and that's all it's really good for. It's really good for that though, if you don't mind the two-cranks-per-stitch action of the machine, which gets real old real fast until you motorise it. Needles for it can be had, but they're about 8euro each. Google and you'll find the crowd in Europe that sells them. The needles are enormous and don't break easy and can be sharpened so you only need a handful. One down side of the needle size is that they cut a pretty big hole relative to the thread they'll pass, but in the aesthetic of their designed task (outsoling shoes) that isn't necessarily a problem the way it is for other leatherwork. It uses different needles to the Junker & Ruh SD.28. I have a slightly newer one that came to me filthy out the back of an orthotics shop. I degreased and cleaned it up well, and the foot lift release was still so siezed I didn't realise it moved until months later. I like them, they're built like swiss watches and work very nicely for their designed task in a package that's far more compact than a curved needle & awl machine.

IMO, you'll waste your time and destroy an otherwise great sewing machine. "Remarkably hefty" for a domestic machine is still puny and weak by the standards of an industrial machine designed to sew leather. You could do wallets and clothing weight leather on a 201 if you're willing to accept wearing it out faster, but 4.5mm is way out of its capabilities. Size 92 thread will look strangely thin on something that thick too. Have a read of Wiz's "The Type of Machine you Need to Sew Leather" thread, pinned at the top of the sewing machines forum.

From what I've read the ensifer ones are made of hard rubber. They're just articulated with leather. I've got enough experience with WMA and leather to say I've never seen any leather, even hard rolled sole bend, that I would use for hand armour for bouting with steel swords that wouldn't end up as bulky as a lacrosse glove or worse. I'd use it for shinai, sure; rattan, maybe; steel no way, no how. The only things I've seen that will give you adequate protection and enough hand mobility to not stuff up the subtleties of technique are steel or equivalent metal, or kydex and the kydex is a bit dodgy IMO. By all means find a Milanese mitten gauntlet pattern and make it out of leather, but test it really really well before you trust it to protect you from someone else hitting you in the fingers.

How many have you done? It'll probably get easier after 20 or so.

Hands are just difficult to armour; "something that will take a hit from a longsword" and "not expensive/difficult to make" are pretty much mutually exclusive as far as I've seen. Lacrosse gloves are about as good as it gets. What you want are steel finger gauntlets with some decent low-profile modern padding inside the gloves, but finger gauntlets are expensive for good reason - ones that fit well take a lot of practice to make. Leather isn't really the right material for this job, it's strength/thickness ratio means it's very hard to get something that will provide reasonable protection without being even bulkier than lacrosse gloves. Not much help, I know, but there are reasons everything you've seen is either steel or costume accessory.

Nahh, I had a nasty bout of food poisoning a few years ago and it made me gluten intolerant. It really sucks, because I love beer and gluten-free beer costs more than cider and tastes like someone already drank it.

Yes, both in absolute quality (the sander leaves a fuzzy surface and edges) and in time. The sander might seem easy now, when skiving is a new skill you haven't mastered yet, but think about what you're doing when you do it with the sander, having to power it, presumably bracing the leather, and dealing with all the noise and dust, etc. compared to the few seconds lap skiving will take you with a sharp knife and a bit of practice. Now multiply that over your leatherworking lifetime... I taught myself to skive with a 'shoe knife', properly sharp, and a bunch of scrap, over the course of an evening. Half an hour of constant practice and I was getting pretty good, an hour after that I'd gone through a bunch of other types of knife and figured out which ones worked best, and then it was on to other sorts of leather. I've got a bunch of different knives now and every time I've gotten a new one I sit down and play with it in various scraps until I've got the hang of it. I still use the shoe knife a fair bit though. Now if I need to skive a strap end, or a fold over, or whatever, I just pick up a knife and do it. Of course, you also need to learn how to properly sharpen your knives, but in leatherwork that's already a non-optional skill.

If it were me I'd buy the thread and wax myself and get the client to buy the leather. It's best to get your own consumables since they'll last several pairs of shoes and give you materials to practice with. What you don't see much of on my blog is all the practice pieces I've burned through. I should probably put more of those up though. Whenever I've come across a new technique I've gone through piles of scrap working it out before trying it on a shoe. Fit is a bit harder, the two shoes I cut in half and put up pictures of ended up that way because the construction was fine but they just didn't fit the feet they were for. Beer in NZ has come a long way since you were here, you should come back and try the Mac's and Monteith's and the other specialist breweries around now. Sadly I can't drink beer any more, but fortunately NZ also does excellent wines.

Emailed. One of these days I'll get it online properly.

Hi Vince, Making wax isn't particularly difficult or messy provided you set yourself up right and use a disposable pot or a tin can to heat the mix in. I've got step-by-step instructions on my blog. The main thing is to avoid setting yourself on fire, so long as you avoid that you're fine. If you really want to make a mess, try rendering 2kg of tallow from suet sometime. I use shoemakers wax (code) for all my hand sewing these days, shoes or not. It's a bit of a pain at first but once you get used to it you won't want to go back. You can't build anything like as strong a seam without it. If you don't use it, get pre-waxed thread or use synthetic or the threads will rot out of your shoes in no time. The thread you want is 10/1, single strand linen shoe thread. I believe Campbell-Randall used to sell it but I'm not sure if they still do. I bought a lifetime supply off ebay a few years ago so I haven't paid attention to current sources since then. Leffler leather in Melbourne, Australia sell balls of Coats Barbour "Linen Single Shoe" thread in 12/1 if you can't find it anywhere else. Search their online store for THRSINLINSHO. It comes in 4-5oz balls which spool out from the middle. You taper the ends and ply it up yourself then add bristles (or a thin flexible needle). There are instructions for that on my blog too. If you can't find any of that you can use 3-strand dacron/teklon thread but I'm not sure if that can be had in small quantities or not. 12/3 is probably Ok. for closing seams, but you'll want something a bit heavier for the sole seam if you want the shoes to last well. I use 3 strands of #10 for my closing seams and 5-9 strands for the sole seam depending on the weight of the shoe. I wouldn't want anything less than 8/3 for linen in the sole seam. If you don't go the route of using single-strand thread you'll need to un-ply 8-12 inches and taper the ends then wax and re-ply it to allow you to put a needle or bristle on smoothly. It's well worth going through this process to save trying to haul a folded full thickness through awl holes. P.S: Purely for the sake of googling usefully, 'turnsole' is a flower. A turnshoe goes on your foot.

Interesting, do you know if, and how, this differs from the seamstick tape sailmakers use?

The other thing you can do is include a calibration card in your picture somewhere it can be cropped out that has white, black and 50% grey squares on it then use that in your photo software to set the white balance.

What sort of outer foot are you using?

I second the advice to go read Wiz' posts on the type of machine you need to sew leather. It'll save you a whole lot of pain in the long run.

Ahh, I see it now thank you. After a bitof googling "Qwik-fix", I think the official place to get that is from http://www.seweazi.com/singer.html

Unless you over-oil the stuff at the front of the head where the needle bar is and end up with oil dripping all over your work. Not that I'd know of course...

Me, not even close. Hell, most of what I know I've learned from posts by people like you, Bob, Wiz and Al Saguto over on the Crispin Colloquy. I'd never do this for money on someone else's machine. That's about right, but finding a copy of the Juki TSC-441 engineers/adjusters manual online made this particular one a bit less painful. Reassembling the cam stack on an old seized up Elna Supermatic without instructions or 'before' photos, that was masochism.

I think there's value in showing what this option really means, and perhaps I'm naïve, but I'd be surprised if any vendors were disappointed I'm posting this (beyond the fact that they spent time giving me quotes and I didn't end up purchasing from them). There is real value in what you vendors do with the machines between getting them from China and sending them to the final owner. If I'd been in the USA I wouldn't even have looked at this option. This is not something that someone who wants a machine that Just Works should do, and if I hadn't already worked on a bunch of machines I would not have gone down this route either after what people have told me about experiences with these machines. I'm also aware I may still need to pay a professional mechanic to get it working for me and service it in the future, but I'm prepared for that if I need to. Ahh, I should clarify this point. I didn't buy this machine direct from the factory, I purchased it from a reseller in New Zealand (I have quotes and invoices for it from an NZ registered company). That reseller is not a mechanic though - he runs a business making and selling parachute rigging and canopies using Hightex machines. The machine was shipped to me directly from the factory in China, but as far as the warranty, and NZ consumer protection laws are concerned I bought it from an NZ company. Because I'm a private purchaser, not a business, if it isn't fit for purpose then the NZ vendor is obligated by law to sort it out. That's the only reason I did it this way, if I hadn't discovered that option I would have saved up and gone with one of the other options I had explored. Shipping the wrong type of motor was the factory's fault, the other bits were the freight forwarder stuffing things up. My machine wasn't as shipment on its own, it came in with other things the reseller had ordered at the same time. The freight forwarder received the whole shipment at the docks and rather than following their instructions they just sent three random boxes to me and the rest to GLH in Queenstown where the rest of the shipment was destined for. In hindsight I think it would have made more sense for them to send everything to Queenstown, sort and verify it and ship my bits back up to me in Auckland, even though that would have added cost and delay. Thanks. So far, so good. The real test will be feeding heavy leather through it under power though. Until I can actually use it to make things, I'll reserve judgement.

A Bit of Background Having read the comments so far, I figured that a little bit of background about me might help put this all in context. I got into leatherwork through medieval reenactment and pretty much hand stitch everything. Mostly I make reproduction shoes, but I want to start making more modern stuff including casework, as well as do some machine work on reenactment goods where it won't show. I'm strictly an amateur and don't need this machine in any particular timeframe, or for large-scale production work. I originally wanted a new machine that would Just Work out of the box, but research showed me that was something I couldn't afford. I am not a mechanic by any stretch of the imagination - I'm a Pointy Haired Boss at a telco where I spent 10 of the previous 11 years as an IP network engineer. I'm an inveterate tinkerer with machinery and a collector of sewing machines large and small (my house is approximately 50% sewing machines by volume). I've done a bit of metal work, made a few knives and a handful of tools. I can gas weld and braze, though I got rid of my torch because acetylene and bottle hire got too expensive for the amount I did it. I'm lucky enough to know actual mechanics who I can call on if I get really stuck, and people with machine tools if I need to modify or repair any parts (If you think rebuilding a sewing machine is a challenge, try a 100 year old steam tram!) This isn't the first sewing/leather machine I'll have worked on, but it is the first big compound feed one. Among other things I have rebuilt or refurbished several domestic treadle machines and a couple of crank splitters. I've serviced and tuned up a Seiko STH-8 for leather, and taken a Dania 150 curved needle outsoler from a frozen gunked up hulk to re-timed and working. I've also got a Pearson #6 and an A1 in pieces awaiting the soda blaster. None of those would have been possible without the expertise on this forum and the Crispin Colloquy. So, that's the context in which I bought this machine. This isn't a course I would recommend for someone without any experience servicing machines, or who needed the machine in a specific timeframe. If you can't set needle height and hook timing by eye, buy your machine from someone who has done the setup! I still don't know if I'll get the machine going, but if I can't I'll pay the mechanic I mentioned in my initial post to do it for me and watch him like a hawk. Reassembly and Tuning Having cleaned all the shipping grease off of the machine and liberally re-lubricated it with Syntex I got to reassembling the thing. Almost immediately after starting the reassembly I tossed out the screwdrivers that came with the machine - they're worse than useless. The tip twisted the first time I used the big one and they don't fit the screws properly. It was interesting to observe the build quality of the machine as I reassembled it. It is very much as I expected on a machine at this price point; the machined surfaces are even and clean and the castings aren't bad but are only machined on mating surfaces. The general fit is good and I didn't find any major loose parts or screws but there are minor bits of fit and finish that just need a little bit more time spent on them. The castings of the feet and needle plates are pretty good. They're finished to a high polish on the surfaces that matter but with the sort of polished finish that belies the fact that they didn't see much in the way of surface grinding to fine grit before going to polish. That doesn't affect their utility but it's an interesting contrast with the standard needle plate which is a fine and even satin finish and seems to be of a different quality, possibly because it's stamped from sheet rather than cast. The double-toe presser foot didn't want to go on the bar at first and needed a bit of filing before it went on, likewise one of the inner feet (they sent me two) needed going after with a 5.5mm drill bit before it would go on the presser foot bar. The paint shows evidence of insufficient surface prep in places. This isn't surprising on a machine at this price since good surface prep for paint is very time consuming, and therefore expensive. I think that's something which sets more expensive machines apart; the Highleads I've seen have had really good paint, and I've got old Pfaff and Seiko machines with paint that is still perfectly good (if dirty). The paint on the hand wheel was showing signs of light rust through when I unpacked it which cleaned off fine. Again, something I'm prepared to live with for a machine at this price point, and not out of the bounds of what I was expecting. The one place the paint on the body of the machine failed in a way that I might have to care about is on the corner of the bobbin winder assembly where the paint cracked off as soon as I got the screw even slightly tight. If it bugs me enough I'll take it along to the local powder coater with one of the loads of other parts I'm getting done and see if they have a coating that matches. The bobbin winder slipped a lot when I tried it at first. It is driven by a disk on the top shaft on the machine bearing on a rubber tyre on the inside of the bobbin winder mechanism. I got it working fine by loosening the grub screws fastening the disk to the shaft and moving it a fraction towards the tyre. The bobbin winder has a little thread cutter/clip that should cut the freshly-wound bobbin thread and hold the end until you do the next one. It had a bit of rust, having missed out on the shipping grease treatment and needed sharpening to actually work. A couple of minutes with a Dremel and it was sharp and clean. After checking with all the foot combinations I realised the outer foot presser bar was ever so slightly squint, not enough to interfere, but just enough to bug me on the bit I'll be staring at most so I rotated it so the feet all line up square now. That was probably unnecessary but once I'd noticed it I couldn't not straighten it. One part that took me a while to figure out was the tension release which wasn't connected into the foot raising mechanism when I unboxed the machine. It took a bit of staring to click as to what it was when it was just dangling off the side of the head: It's supposed to be connected like this: What it does is that when you raise the foot it wedges the main tension discs open so the thread can be pulled through, allowing the work to be withdrawn from the machine. The last oddity I encountered was the roller guide. The regular little plate that sits to the right of the needle plate has a rebate milled into it for a part it covers that isn't flush with the frame of the machine. The roller guide doesn't have that rebate so it's a bit fiddly to bolt on. Being the only one I've seen I don't know if they're all like that though. The slot in the guide isn't quite milled as long as I'd like so the closest the roller gets is about 5-6 mm away from the inner foot. At some point I'll take the part along to a friend who has a small mill and fix the rebate and slot the way I want. Aside from those relatively minor things, the machine went back together just fine and I have no major complaints with it. Getting it Sewing I can't really get it sewing properly until I have the stand and motor, but with the machine temporarily clamped to a table I can turn it over by hand and make sure it at least builds a stitch Ok and get the lift of the alternating feet adjusted etc. The only heavy threads I have at the moment are #6 linen and #8 core-spun cotton/nylon so I'm not going to do a lot until I've got some bonded poly and thread lube. The bobbins are cast aluminium and seem perfectly good. The hook is pretty much what I expected, which is to say I think it'll work with a bit of fiddling about, but I'll replace it with a Hirose one as soon as I've got the money. It intermittently catches the thread either on the spring or on the back of the hook as it counter-rotates. It's possible this is caused by a timing problem, but if it is it's one that's too subtle for me to work out just now since the timing looks fine to me. The finish of the bobbin case under the tension spring also leaves a bit to be desired and intermittently shreds the thread when withdrawing the work from the machine. This might well be operator error but if I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong I'll go after it with the dremel and polish the thread path, being careful not to sharpen any of the edges. That's about it until I get the stand, which to my frustration still hasn't shown up thanks to ill-timed leave on the part of the vendor's Christchurch staff member whose site the shipment is at.

Unfortunately that's just a copy of the parts list available from the singerco.com site rather than an operating manual for the machine.

Absolutely. If getting this machine up and sewing had been at all time sensitive, I'd be stuffed since I still don't have the stand and the vendor told me yesterday that the factory shipped the wrong motor with it - sending a clutch motor instead of the servo I ordered. That's not a huge problem for me, because I have a servo I can pull off an under-used machine here, but if I didn't have that it would be a major annoyance.