AlZilla

I don't generally make things to sell, but i'm often asked about things I'm carrying or wearing. Be a walking billboard for your work. Be that "leather guy". Lots of times the conversation will include the difference between some item that puked out the back end of a factory in an unpronounceable province in some far off land and the bespoke, one of a kind item at hand.

Thank you for the detailed response. It gives me a lot to think about. I could definitely build a sturdy bench for heavier work and just use our regular tables and seating for the most of it. Interesting that you shared tools between students. My mind instantly went to "I'd need enough starter sets to have one for each student". I'm thinking that even in our small town of 1500 people, there'd be enough interest to do a beginning class a couple times a year. I'm often enough asked about my hats, suspenders, wallet, etc. I need to give this some serious thought about resources and lesson plan. Thanks for the inspiration and motivation!

Oh yeah, I've had a BOLO out on one of those old Nationals since I found out they existed ...

Yeah, my mind went there, too. It was pointed out to me that the needle thread has to pass around the entire bobbin in order to capture the bobbin thread. I can't remember if it was this thread or another that someone pointed out the similarity between this design and the large bobbin of the 441 class machines. The bigger the bobbin that the needle thread has to loop around, the more times it has to go through the sewn material and be pulled back up by the tension arm. There are some practical limits. But, how nice would it be to use a full spool in the bobbin??? Here's a link to the earlier post about the old National domestc machine that used a whole spool for a bobbin: https://leatherworker.net/forum/topic/121438-why-do-we-still-use-bobbins/page/2/#findComment-758063

I love what you've done here. A small class with a good mix of ages and everyone got to do something unique to their knife. I'd be interested in how you structured it. I'm thinking you had to have done multiple classes. How many, spread out over how many days/weeks? Do you have your own space it did you borrow a place? I ask because I have a small community building with a space we can configure as a class room. I'm looking for something like this we could do. Sewing classes are on my mind. Congratulations on a great project.

@Brad denham Welcome to the forum! I slipped this over to the leather sewing machine sub forum. You probably need to repost those pics as .jpg, .png or something that non -Apple users can see just add them to a reply if the edit window is closed. Some words about what you're wanting to do or accomplish with the machines would help people offer more relevant help, maybe. Thanks

You know, somewhere I think I have a pallet of 60 watt incandescents stashed away. Maybe I have a market for them now!

I split this off that 8 year old thread and into a new topic for you. Let's see if someone can help you out.

Wiz beat me to the punch here, but I found specs on a 289rb-hlp-1 that says 5/8" max lift under the presser foot and it uses 135x17 needles. That should give the next person looking a little more info to make a decision. A grand seems a little steep to me anyway. Maybe.

Is the needle the right size for the thread? There's a chart here: https://tolindsewmach.com/thread-chart.html

I don't have a significant lag most times but very often I get a "page can't be reached" message and the page loads a few seconds later. Both on my home DSL and mobile 5G. You may recall a few months back, we had a DDOS attack and it took the Boss a few days to get it straightened out. Maybe we're still being hammered and she's just filtered most of it out.

I noted the original post to alert any browsers to the new price, Beautiful looking stuff.

Amazon or ebay has a wide variety of them dirt cheap. I just grabbed a few magnetic based, flexible necked lights. If you have a servo motor, the box might even have a plug so it comes on with the machine.

The easiest is just to reply to your own post. If you like, once you do that I can go edit your original post to refer to the new and improved price. The edit window is only a short time, thanks to the spammers. They like to come back and edit their garbage in later on.

Hi Lee, I suppose somebody may be willing to provide phone instruction. A more immediate solution should be one of the many tutorials available online: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pancake+knife+sheath+tutorial&t=brave&ia=web A specific question here usually gets a good response. I'm going to flip this over to the knife sheath section and see what kind of response you get. Also going to tweak the title.

Yeah, I saw it after I hit the submit button ... 😱

A site search for LU-563 turns up 18 pages of reading material. https://leatherworker.net/forum/search/?&q=111w156&page=2&quick=1&item=132320&search_and_or=or&sortby=relevancy

That looks like a win to me. It's a pretty close clone of the Singer 111w156, if not identical. Parts and information are going to be abundant and easily found. Look for the user instructions. If the 156 isn't easily found, the 111w155 will be close enough for the oiling points. You know that journey of a thousand miles that begins with a single step? You just took that step. Welcome to the rabbit hole. EDIT: Here's the 156 manual. It'll get you started. 111w156.pdf

Ask the client to measure his pens.

Well, the good news is that you probably don't have to take it all apart. and you might just be able to oil it and go. Some pictures would help us to to evaluate it. Maybe a video walk around. Do you have the whole machine, table,motor and all? Or just a head unit? For starters, I'd oil it everywhere metal moves against metal. All the oiling points on top, everyplace underneath that a bushing, bearing or anything else moves metal on metal. Turn it over by hand and let it sit for a day. If you have the whole setup, motor and all try running it and give it a listen. When I got my first industrial, it turned over a lot harder than any domestic i had worked with. I had no idea how tight it should have been so I erred way on the side of caution and flushed PB Blaster through everything followed by sewing machine oil. Turned it endlessly by hand trying to decide if it was too tight. I removed the internal belt so I could evaluate the top and bottom separately. After a week or so of this activity, turned out it was fine to begin with.

Red Nichols, as I recall, recommends horse butt strips. I've been trying to find the post over on the Smith & Wesson forum where he talked about it. I'll keep looking.

@BaroqueLeatherGal, you could tag @terrymac to get their attention.

It takes some research but you can find cheap servos with a start speed of 100 rpms. In my case, with the small pulley and a speed reducer, I can get down to 11 stitches/minute. There's a whole rabbit trail of slow speed versus cooling. But I think at the hobby level we're not running these things for prolonged periods of time, so it's probably not a giant issue. 11 spm is ridiculously slow.

It will But you may want to find a version where the control box is separate from the motor. This way the controls can be mounted at the edge of the table where you can play with them. The style you show would require you to climb under the table to tweak any of the settings.

Welcome to the forum! I patiently moved this to Leatherworking Conversation and tweaked the title. It's really a general question so maybe it'll get more traffic over here.