Hey Guys,
As the title suggests, I'm having a bit of trouble and wanted to run it by the collective wisdom here and see if you all have any ideas.
I had just changed the needle yesterday and was getting ready to stitch a belt, and it seems I didn't fully tighten the needle in the needle bar. I was manually turning the flywheel to make the fist couple of stitches, luckily, because the needle was yanked out and became kinda wedged in the shuttle area. After getting the needle out, I took apart the shuttle/bobbin/race and inspected it for damage or burs. I saw and felt nothing, so put everything back together and did a few test stitch lines. This is where I noticed a problem.
It's apparent something is out of whack. It starts out ok for about 10 stitches or so, but then the stitch spacing becomes extremely inconsistent. It seems that the machine isn't properly advancing the leather, sometimes even stitching in the same hole twice. Makes no difference if it's threaded or not. I've attached a couple of photos to show you what I mean. I've also noticed the stitch hole spacing seems to be effected by how fast the machine is running. Not sure if it's pertinent or not, but I'm running it with the standard plate/ feed dog set-up. Maybe some kind of timing issue?
It seems a call to Cobra Steve might be in order here, but I though I'd also run it by you guys and see if anyone might have a clue what's going on, or experienced anything like this before.