What can a Juki TL actually do?

[Spyros]

58 minutes ago, CrankAddict said:

Her store sells both.  They literally have a 2010q sitting next to a 1541 on the showroom floor.  She personally has a 1541 and a 555 at home along with a Janome domestic machine.  I went over and talked with her for nearly 2 hours yesterday and I am going to buy her 555 (which their Juki tech converted to a servo motor) for a couple hundred bucks.  It's an "I've got nothing to lose" price in my mind so I might as well try it.  Surely it can do more than the little Brother PS1000 I have.  And I'm fully aware the 555 is a "garment machine" not designed for heavy materials, doesn't have a walking foot, etc.  I'll see how far it can take me and if the need arises get a Cobra 26 EPS w/the flatbed add-on and be done with it.

The thing I'd push back on regarding your hobby store analogy is that leatherworker.net regularly showcases wallets and watch straps.  So discussing a sewing machine to accomplish such things on this forum seems "on brand".  If I were looking to marry two pieces of 0.05mm leather to create my own custom line of condoms then I could see the comparison to doll houses.  A cabinet maker is nowhere near the "miniature scale" end of the woodworking spectrum.  Nor is he able to deal with 6" thick beams.

In any case, I'm absolutely not "angry" and have enjoyed the input and conversation from you all.  Thank you.

Report back please, I'm curious

[DrmCa]

DDL-555? It's high-speed textile machine.

[Matt S]

9 hours ago, CrankAddict said:

Her store sells both.  They literally have a 2010q sitting next to a 1541 on the showroom floor.  She personally has a 1541 and a 555 at home along with a Janome domestic machine.  I went over and talked with her for nearly 2 hours yesterday and I am going to buy her 555 (which their Juki tech converted to a servo motor) for a couple hundred bucks.  It's an "I've got nothing to lose" price in my mind so I might as well try it.  Surely it can do more than the little Brother PS1000 I have.  And I'm fully aware the 555 is a "garment machine" not designed for heavy materials, doesn't have a walking foot, etc.  I'll see how far it can take me and if the need arises get a Cobra 26 EPS w/the flatbed add-on and be done with it.

A 555 or other similar garment-weight industrial will probably do better than a domestic/hobby machine on leather, though I expect it to be still rather limited regarding feed positivity, material thickness, thread size and climbing ability. As you say $200 is "try it and see" money. The servo will certainly help with controllability, but you may have issues with the oil pump because you won't be running at full speed 99% of the time (what garment machines are optimised for). I'm not familiar enough with the 555 to say for certain.

 

Quote

The thing I'd push back on regarding your hobby store analogy is that leatherworker.net regularly showcases wallets and watch straps.  So discussing a sewing machine to accomplish such things on this forum seems "on brand".  If I were looking to marry two pieces of 0.05mm leather to create my own custom line of condoms then I could see the comparison to doll houses.  A cabinet maker is nowhere near the "miniature scale" end of the woodworking spectrum.  Nor is he able to deal with 6" thick beams.

Wallets and watch straps (well, certainly not the good ones showcased on this forum) aren't typically made from garment leather -- which is not only very thin but has a soft handle and relatively loose fibre -- but a variety of thicker, stiffer and tighter fibre leathers. A domestic/hobby machine will not work very well with these sorts of leathers. That's why I was analogising to dolls houses and model boats, garment leather is the light extreme of leather work, just as thin strips of balsa and bass/lime wood is at the light extreme of woodwork. And you probably won't be happy with a watch strap or a wallet made from garment leather.

Wallets, watch straps, belts and thin belts live squarely in the "furniture and cabinet making" region of our woodworking analogy. Upholstery too. Bread and butter stuff for most leather workshops.

Leather condoms, now that's a market I never considered! You can get them made from sheepgut still. Invented by the Scots centuries ago but it took an Englishman to cotton onto the idea of removing them from the sheep before use... 

[DrmCa]

We got our DDL-553, which is a heavy fabric version of 555, for free. We would have never considered paying US$200 for a used single needle lockstitch machine. When we tried it with leather it wouldn't feed nor would it climb onto and off the thicker seams. We tried a roller foot but it was a royal pain and did not make things any better.

Oiling is not a problem when running at low speed because once a month we would floor it for a minute and that would pass enough oil through the wicks. It really only is a problem over many years of slow use.

[CrankAddict]

1 hour ago, DrmCa said:

We got our DDL-553, which is a heavy fabric version of 555, for free. We would have never considered paying US$200 for a used single needle lockstitch machine. When we tried it with leather it wouldn't feed nor would it climb onto and off the thicker seams. We tried a roller foot but it was a royal pain and did not make things any better.

I feel like your insistence that I'm so angry is a bit of projection.  With a servo motor upgrade I believe a 555 is quite similar to an 8700 so it would seem to be worth something.  Obviously not to you, but I have non-leather projects planned as well.  Surely you won't argue with me that we all need multiple sewing machines, so worst case this 555 will check one of the other boxes and go unused for leather.  Your sig lists your 553 for sale, out of curiosity, how much are you asking? 

[DrmCa]

1 hour ago, CrankAddict said:

Your sig lists your 553 for sale, out of curiosity, how much are you asking?

I've taken some parts from it, to put on my Mitsubishi, so it's not worth more than CDN$100 in its present state. Needs about $20-30 of investments.

[kgg]

1 hour ago, CrankAddict said:

Surely you won't argue with me that we all need multiple sewing machines, so worst case this 555 will check one of the other boxes and go unused for leather. 

If the 555 doesn't workout for your other projects the way you want / need and the other major parts like the table top, metal table frame and servo motor can be repurposed to be reused on another machine. If the table frame is older chances are it was constructed with a much heavier gauge of metal unlike a lot of the newer flimsy imported ones that are typically supplied with a lot of the machines these days. Even the table top can usually be redo, depending on the age, as a lot of the older ones were a full 2 inches thick of good plywood. The machine you could probably sell just as the head only or repurpose some of the parts.

I often repurpose sewing machine parts: my manual lathe is sat on a sewing machine table; the lathe is powered by a 550 watt Rex brush servo motor; one of my Singer 29k's is mounted on a cut down table top and metal frame repurposed from a POS PFAFF 487 that I paid $90 ($70 US) for; another older sewing machine frame was repurposed as the base for a 4' x3' working surface. The clutch motor from the PFAFF 487 was used to replace the burnout motor on a Consew 223 just before selling that machine. The PFAFF 487 head will be stripped for the shafts / gears / etc and reused in another project.

13 minutes ago, DrmCa said:

so it's not worth more than CDN$100 in its present state. Needs about $20-30 of investments.

That would be about $100 US in total.

kgg