TSC 441 Clone from China

[amuckart]

On 3/14/2021 at 9:04 AM, Matt S said:

I think that one of our members from New Zealand bought a 441 clone direct from the factory and wrote about his experience. Could be worth a look.

That was me

If you don’t need the machine in a specific timeframe, and you’re comfortable with setting it up from scratch assuming it’s never been even vaguely adjusted, it might be worth it. I’m not a professional machinist or mechanic, but I’d stripped and rebuilt machines before I got mine. It still took me the thick end of 6 months to get it sewing properly. I value that as a learning experience now but it was a struggle at the time.

Mine came from Hightex (CowBoy’s parent company) so I figured it wasn’t quite as much of a crapshoot as buying a random brand one. That said, someone else had done the same thing and had to completely dismantle the machine, flush machining debris out of the head and grind on a few parts before reassembling the whole thing from scratch before it would sew. 

With the resources available on here I could probably do that with a 441 today, but now that there’s a dealer in NZ who offer support etc. I’d be mad to and the next CowBoy machine I buy will be from the dealer.

Not all machines are made equal, and not all factories making the same models do equally good jobs. I’ve got four Chinese clone machines from different factories and the Highlead is streets ahead of the others in terms of quality. The CowBoy/Hightex isn’t bad (except for the paint job which looks like they did zero surface prep beforehand). The Mercury is Ok but nothing to write home about and the rando brand one sews, but is not at all well finished and is kinda roughly cast. Fortunately it doesn’t get used much these days.