RockyAussie

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.

Hey @dikman if you can be patient enough for a few hours I will take some pictures of a set up I've done here. Basically it allows me to do a quick change over for whatever the thread type of the die required or even in some cases some with no thread at all.

It may be just something optical but is the feed dog angled to the right? If it is rubbing the edges perhaps on the needle plate may cause some noise. I generally put a couple of drops of oil down into the hook bobbin case area between every 2 or 3 bobbin changes. You will note a quieter change every time you do this.

Very nice work there paloma

I have seen this statement before but nothing that comes even close to backing it up when it comes to the landed cost. Sending it back and getting any further satisfaction would also be I suspect another pie in the sky.

Sorry we call them keepers and some call them belt retainers. The loop that holds down the tongue after the belt tip goes through the buckle is what I call a belt keeper normally.

Thanks for sharing your efforts with us all. Have you made one up yet and have you got any pictures to show?

Ha Ha...... best she doesn't see that link down the bottom here to my "Wild Harry" web site then A?