RockyAussie

It looks good to me and has the large "M" boobin. Only bad is the 10mm leather sewing thickness. For most wallet and purses and not too bulky totes and stuff it would be great. As you don't to my knowledge have a skiver as yet keep in mind that being able to go thicker would be handy sometimes. Do a few measurements on your Monte Carlo and just be sure that it will do what you want. A lot of the time you can design in to keep things pretty trim but that can mean a skiver would be desirable. As @mikesc pointed out I think it would be very similar to the Techsew 2600 and the measurements would be as those below in the picture -

That look showed me this as well - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Juki-441-Heavy-Duty-Walking-Foot-Cylinder-Arm-Industrial-Sewing-Machine/173961083393?_trkparms=aid%3D1110006%26algo%3DHOMESPLICE.SIM%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D225076%26meid%3Df11d5de2c4554ed2ba14f686f4bc1431%26pid%3D100010%26rk%3D4%26rkt%3D12%26sd%3D263927001186%26itm%3D173961083393%26pmt%3D0%26noa%3D1%26pg%3D2047675%26algv%3DDefaultOrganicWithImageNsfwFilter%26brand%3DJuki&_trksid=p2047675.c100010.m2109

Is your thread take up spring over tight. The thread should just start to slacken as the needle hits the leather. The needle does look like an LR I think and the orientation looks good but just try turning the needle a wee bit so that the slice is closer to to an 11 oclock rather than 10 and see if it improves. With the rubbery back stuff you may need to give the top of the leather a little pre polish or silicone spray if you have some. This helps to keep the needle and thread from gripping as much and the resulting mis stitching. How high does the dog foot raise above the needle plate?

As @dikman said above is true. A cheaper alternative and a pretty good start off machine is the 227R clones. Techsew 2700 or CB 227R are a couple of them. Needle from edge is about 7mm, smaller diameter than the others I recommended but at the expense of a smaller bobbin. The bobbin is still bigger than the old 335 being a G style at around 22x10mm. The stitch length is shorter at a max 5mm but that's not too bad. Threads can go down to #45 (60M) and up to 207. In standard form you only get 10mm of thickness leather to go through but with a 190 system needle you can adjust the needle bar up to get a 1/2" (13mm) leather through.

Your bobbin winding may not be uniform enough. When it winds on it is important that the thread does not get buried in places as that will increase the pressure on and off as it gets pulled out. Other thing is that as the thread feeds of the cone the cone should be positioned to not be angled and have a fair distance to relax before going through any holes. Some threads can be very springy and give tension problems due to the intermittent snagging as it feeds it way to the needle.

I am suspicious that when you are doing the turns you are lifting the feet too high. This separates the tension discs and the top thread goes loose and allows more to come back up on the following stitch. Check if the discs separate too early for you and if you cant work around it with adjustments then you may need to do some cutting and grinding.

I will look forward to your input Matt. What started as a little thought to stop people buying the wrong machine to start with has started to take on a marathon of digging up information which often does not match up between suppliers. @toxo I am waiting on some more information to come in but I would like to lead you away from the Pfaff 335 style to start with. Most always they are set up for binding and that means they come with a needle a full 9mm in from the edge. That is NOT ideal for gusset work. The thickness they can handle is 10mm if that, and that is less than the handles and perhaps the base on you Monte Carlo as shown below for others to understand. The bobbins on these old ones are only around 21x9mm and with 138 (20m) thread you dont get very far before its empty again. Another thing with these Pfaff 335 is that the feed dog does not oscillate unless it is a very rare P version. A way better alternative to the small cylinder range would be the Techsew 2600 which has a needle 7mm in from the edge, an oscillating dog foot and a M style bobbin of nearly twice the capacity of the other. 25x11 or 1"x3/8". If you are doing belts believe me an M style is very desirable. It is I think a Juki LJ-341 clone. https://www.techsew.com/us/techsew-2600-pro-cylinder-leather-industrial-sewing-machine.html That said If you don't have a good working skiver to start with I would steer you more toward the Techsew 2750 or the Cowboy 6900 as they have the needle still close to the edge at 7mm, large M bobbins and will give you a full 13mm (1/2") leather thickness sewing. They will also get you up into the thicker thread 207 (13M) threads which you may want by the look of your Monte Carlo.

Hey @toxo, I am putting together a few comparisons on different cylinder machines and their useful differences at the moment. This will focus mostly on the working cylinder end where all the important to making stuff happens. It will cover things like the thickness of leather they can handle,sizes of bobbins, how far the needle is from the left edge and the size of the cylinder at the end, Thread size capabilities and a few other bits. These things as a maker of a wide variety of products mean more to me than a lot of the information I find available on the dealer web sites generally. I am waiting on a few more dealers pictures to finish this off and hope to have this post up next week sometime. Here below are a couple of the pictures of the type of thing I am talking about -

All of the above pictures are under 100 kb and you can post up to about 1.4 mb of pictures in the one post session.

To get any business up and running well you need to establish that there is a demand for what you can supply and at what price point. The creative side in us all here motivates us to make the product we think will sell and then go on to try and sell it. A better method is to establish first what the customers are interested to buy and which products have the most demand. Ask for the opinions of your local retailers. The type of machinery required then is more easy to give advise on. I hope to have a cylinder sewing machine type comparison post ready to post sometime next week. You may find that the marketing is not as necessary initially as you think. Getting good with your camera taking product pictures is something you can do now and post on here for discussion. Various view points on what machines and methods on manufacturing could then be discussed. Generally a picture reduced to around to a100 kilobytes comes out good. You need to get good at that for your catalogue work anyway. A few good pictures of your product emailed to potentially interested buyers is petty cheap to do and can work better than all the social media and web pages you can come up with. There are an ever changing array of media marketing methods and mostly I think they are the ones that take up your time and money the most. My main manufacturing business has no web page (AND I KEEP TELLING THEM WE DON'T WANT ONE) and we do no marketing with it either. This business makes mostly crocodile leather goods and supplies to a few large customers and has done so for more than 25 years. They supply their own croc skins and a lot of trust is necessary. A little of what I am doing with the cylinder machine comparison post coming -

It should only need to wind on evenly. Too tight and the thread can sink in and create tight spots as it comes out of the bobbin case giving uneven tension problems.

Keeping in mind your finances I will say to think about direct target marketing via email. Not much cost in that. That info is in the phone books and google for free. Send me a pm with some pictures of your products and your pricing if you have that worked out. You could just do that in this post perhaps as well. Worry about taking good pictures later.

I would just start with an oversize piece and contact glue it up and then stretch it down over the case so that it just goes a bit over where the middle seam line should be. Leave the leather long where the 2 halves meet as well as that would be trimmed of afterward. Cut down through the middle seam line and then lay it out flat onto some stiff cardboard. Leave a good bit over for you to be able to pull the cup shape down with your fingers. That should now be your pattern done. Then after cutting out the 2 sides, stitch the pieces together and then draw them down over the case. Pull back upward to get some glue in between the case and the leather and then carefully trim off the over size leather.

YOU WOULD BE BETTER TO POST THIS QUESTION IN THE SEWING MACHINE SECTION. You will get a lot more replies there for sure.

Try taking a little off of the starting corner (about 1/2 way in) and then start. This takes away the sudden jump down on the feed wheel. Also if you back down the pressure on the feed bottom wheel you should get a better result. That is the adjustment knob at the very rear on the left which would turn anticlockwise to lessen pressure. You will get some better results after you get the dressing stick and clean up the inside of the bell edge. With a top roller it pays to have a fairly wide sharpen in the bell and if your sharpening stone is not at 90% or more of its original diameter you may not be getting enough width of sharpening. It gets to a point where the blade gets too blunt an angle and the back part of the bevel on the blade presses too hard on the leather and will not feed through any good. Interesting thing I saw recently on one of the clone machines is that it is possible to adjust the grinding stone forward or back and that means you can adjust the stone back for a broader width sharpen. That is not possible on my old Fortuna. Another thing ....that bottom feed wheel would be great on heavy leathers but I would be surprised if it were much good on upholstery type soft leathers. A medium feed stone would be better I believe.

I think that ( The Solingen round knife) happens to be the brand of a couple of round knives I have been using for many years now. There is no writing on them I can see but they have the spade impression in the handle. You can see one of them in use in this video I made https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JAPRs6tx2w

Very well done and the lasting looks excellent. I think like with knives and their pouches you should be showing the lasts beside as well One question ....what do you mean when you say " Unstructured toe" ???

True story.....I nearly got shot doing that once. Very HOT day and the Police pulled me over and asked me to get out of the car. Hot road so I reached down to get my shoes and the next thing I had a gun through the window next to my head. Luckily after he stopped shaking he recognised me and all turned out alright in the end.

For this type of work (normally pretty slow) I would do it for every 4 hours of use but if doing heavy and hard I'd drop that back to every 2 hours. I do, do the bobbin area with a couple of drops every second bobbin though. When they are quite quite I feel better

I did understand that but as you mentioned the noise change on the Consew 227 I thought it may help if you checked out all of the different oiling points on it as per in the manual. 8 different points just around the cylinder bobbin case area. There is also some more up the top end under that cover if you have not noticed it in the diagram. With the Zoje and any other self oiling machine I would recommend running them on high speed for a minute before starting your work. This will allow the oil to pump around and get the oil out and about to where it has to be. If after that, there appears to no oil getting around after an hour or so then you need to increase the oil flow which most machines will have a regulator somewhere to adjust this with. If you adjust too far you will have oil flying out everywhere and that's not desirable either.

It has a pneumatic cylinder with a fair bit off mechanical advantage as well built in, so therefore the pressure is variable and not generally something you want to get your ...............finger stuck between I can bring it down slow or like a hammer if I want and I haven't found any rivet/stud it cant do yet.

A picture would help but is there room for a spacer washer between the offending die and the ram? Does it happen with any dye's? Note that if you have a moveable base piece it can be centred where ever is needed as well. Thanks Mike but I would have been happier if I had thought of it maybe 10 or so years before I did, I would not then have a whole heap of little different presses for different dyes although they still come in handy sometimes. P.S. Been thinking some more about doing some of that tutorial stuff but I will save that for another post.

There is quite a few spots to oil if you check the manual page 4 figure 8. http://www.consew.com/Files/112347/InstructionManuals/227R-2.pdf

Here you go I think the pictures should cover it ... After doing the first one on the top left and tapping the hole for the small threaded ones I got a bit smarter and did the 2nd one one the right so that it could receive the larger threaded one below it or the ones without thread as on the far right.