CONQUERING THE GREMLINS IN YOUR HOME SEWING MACHINE : eBay Guides

How was your last sewing experience?  Was it something like this: you bought the fabric, the pattern, the matching thread.  When the time came, you even remembered how to wind the bobbin.

And suddenly, thwap, buzz, wheeeeeee.  The hook is bound up, the hand wheel refuses to turn, there's a spaghetti chest of loops on the underside of what had promised to be the cutest daffodil costume ever made for a spring play.  On top of everything else, the gremlin inside the upper tension dial is laughing at the look on your face when you spy an unruly spiral of popped thread, that when you saw it last, was uniformly unwinding from its spool and was neatly threaded through a fairly expensive German needle!

Kinda like the Twilight Zone.  You know.  That episode where William Shatner is happily flying for the first time since he conquered his fears, and as the plane's underway, he sees the gremlin out on the wing of the airplane, pulling the aluminum skin off the engine cowling, and he's the only one to see this imminent horror?

Unfortunately, the home sewing world can be eerily similar...

Now you are beginning to question why you bought this fifty-year-old, used, mechanical machine on EBAY, when you could have spent ten times as much on a computerized wonder from Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, or wait a minute, does that say Malaysia?  And did you say ten times as much?

So even though your self-esteem has taken a hit, you've decided to give ole Isaac Singer, Sears Kenmore, or Homer New White another try, because the seller did seem sincere and the machine did work perfectly when it arrived at your door.  And you KNOW you CAN do this!

You had the presence of mind to get an owner's manual for the machine.  You might as well read it.

                                   TROUBLESHOOTING & MAINTENANCE

There are three things that affect the balance of a stitch:          

                                                                     (1) Needle size and condition.

                                                                     (2) Cleanliness and lubrication of the machine.

                                                                     (3) Upper tension setting and presser foot adjustment.

If you can master these three things on your machine, there is a very good chance you won't ever see another gremlin around again!

                                                                          Needle Size & Condition

 The needle on a sewing machine is way more important than you think.  It's responsible for all those sewing demos you see on eBay.  The ones that show where the machine has sewn leather.  This is impressive to a newbie, but all they're showing you is what a leather rated sewing machine needle can do.  They're wedge shaped so that they can enter and exit the leather smoothly.  That doesn't take power.  It just takes the right needle!

A sewing machine needle goes in and out of fabric thousands of times in the course of making just one garment.  And believe it or not, fabric is tough, even after it's been preshrunk and the sizing is washed out.  Sizing is the chemical that makes your nose itch when you go to the fabric store.  It's also what makes the fabric drape so nicely on the bolt and the shelf.

But back to our needle and the fabric.  This going in and out thousands of times actually mars the needle.  That is, the needle actually gets scraped, and forms burrs on its surface.  The burrs begin to catch, and pretty soon, you see a definite change in your stitch line.  The needle may skip; it may break the thread going through the eye; it may break the bobbin thread; it'll pop threads in your fabric; it can even damage your bobbin case or hook.

So it's vital to change the needle with every project, at least.  Spare no expense.  Throw the old one out!  Your machine and your project will thank you.

The size of the needle is also important.  The lower the number, the lighter the fabric you can sew.  The higher the number, the heavier the fabric you can sew with it.

Some needles are made in a special way.  Wing needles are made just for machine embroidery.  Leather needles are wedge shaped to make a neat hole.  Needles made for sewing knits have ball points so they don't snag and pop the fibers on their entry or exit.

So if the thread's a-poppin', you can be certain the gremlins are hoppin', so CHANGE YOUR NEEDLE!

                                                                   Cleaning & Lubricating Your Machine

Okay, the next step may be the most important of all, and it's the dirty little secret that used sewing machine sellers and home sewers like me know all too well.  Hardly any home sewers lubricate their sewing machines.  If you want to run the gremlins out for good, clean out the hook and the feed dogs, and lubricate the machine, at the points indicated in your manual.

Now most contemporary machines don't need to be oiled, except by the dealer, but ALL SEWING MACHINES HAVE A HOOK AND FEED DOGS, AND THEY NEED TO BE CLEANED AT THE BEGINNING OF EVERY PROJECT!

The manual will tell you how to remove the needle plate, located underneath the needle and the foot.  There you will find the aluminum teeth that move the fabric along as your machine is stitching.  Those are the feed dogs.

You can use the brush that came with your machine, or you can use an old toothbrush.  Sometimes, I just use a toothpick.  But the idea is to brush across those little teeth and right in between them to clean out the lint.

Where does all this lint come from?  Sure, the fabric is clean, but it has loose fibers all over its surface.  With the weight of the presser foot pushing down on the fabric, and these little feed dogs' teeth scraping along the fabric, you can build up a lot of lint underneath.

There are also stray fibers on the thread you use.  The cheaper the thread, the more linty it is.  And those fibers come off in the tensions, the bobbin case, and the hook.  And you're going to have lots of frustration ahead of you fighting broken thread, and cleaning out your machine about five times as often as you normally would.  So DON'T use cheap thread.

The cheapest you should allow yourself to use is cotton-wrapped polyester.  Don't expect the twenty-five cent all polyester thread that they sell in a bin at the local discount or dollar store to be clean enough and strong enough to do a decent job.  Quit being a cheapskate.  You bought the machine on eBay and got a great deal.  Isn't that enough?

Back to the lint. You may not see lint in the dogs.  But maybe you see tufts floating around the hook and bobbin.  This is when I use my most technically sophisticated tool, the pipe cleaner!  I stick my pipe cleaner inside the machine around and underneath the feed dogs, and it captures lint I can't even see.

Now keep reading your directions in your manual, because I'm betting the next thing your manual shows you is how to remove the bobbin, bobbin case, and hook.  The hook is REAL important.  It's the thing responsible for the lock stitch.  It's the really sharp hook-looking thingy that encircles the bobbin case.  It draws the upper thread into a circle just as the needle comes down.  The upper thread loops the lower thread and pulls it up to lock together, making a lockstitch.

Most machines have pretty much the same configuration for bobbin and hook, but the important thing is to read your manual, and follow the manufacturer's instructions.  I always take out completely all three parts: the bobbin, bobbin case, and finally the hook, if possible.

I always run my pipe cleaner, using the wire end of it, or my toothpick around the race of the bobbin case, if your machine has a case with a race... the race is the trench around the outside of some bobbin cases.  The thread rides in here as the hook hauls it around to meet the needle.

A lot of sewing machines have been judged broken by their owners just because of a linted up, felted up bobbin case or hook. On some machines I've removed lint that was so smashed together it had become felt, as much as 1/8 of an inch thick!  In a case like that, there is nowhere for the thread to go, so the lower never meets the upper thread, and the sewer unknowingly pronounces the machine DEAD!

Sewing machines, even old mechanical ones, are really amazing.  All they need is a bit of cleaning now and then, and a bit of sewing machine oil, and they're ready.  The manual will show you where to oil the hook.  One drop is about all you need per project.

The manual will also show you where to oil the rest of the sewing machine.  Now, you'll find out what all those suspicious looking holes are for all over the machine.

I've advised you not to skimp on thread, and now I must advise you not skimp on oil.  There are people in this world who devoutly believe that salad oil, 3-N-1 oil, or WD-40 will lubricate a sewing machine.  Apparently they think what's good enough for their romaine should be good enough for a precision tool with all metal gears!   3-N-1 oil is for hair clippers and blenders.  WD-40 is great for cleaning built up oil and grease and nicotine off a sewing machine, but DON'T rely upon it for lubrication.  Now, must I explain what Wesson is for?

Sewing machine oil is very light, so if it gets on fabric, it'll wash out easily.  There's another reason that it's so lightweight.  If the machine has to sit for a year in the closet before your next project, a lightweight oil is less likely to solidify.  I have actually seen sewing machine gears so gummed up with solidified axle grease--or what have you--that they didn't turn, and the motor labored, trying to get the gears to move.

                                                                                  Upper Tension & Presser Foot Adjusting

The third suggestion for banishing your sewing machine gremlins is to become familiar with the settings controlling the pressure on your presser foot, and your upper tension settings.

If the foot is too heavy moving over the fabric, it will stretch the fabric just that little bit, and ruin your beautifully balanced line of stitching by popping the thread.  If the foot is too light, then the fabric barely moves through, and the thread may actually start forming loops instead of well locked stitches.

By the way, sewing machine gremlins just love loops.  It's amazing what a line of loops or a stray thread can do to stop a machine.  So if you don't want to have to get your tweezers and pull tiny nits of thread from your bobbin case and hook, nits that you'd swear were pulling back--is there a gremlin on the other end?--keep the pressure on your presser foot adjusted.

A lot of people are completely baffled by the upper tension on their sewing machine.  First however, I must say that the lower tension, which is located on the bobbin case, hardly ever needs adjusting.  Even if the machine is making the most outrageously large loops on the underside of your fabric, you probably only need to worry about the upper tension.

If thread has a tendency to leave lint underneath the needleplate, think about how much lint must come off between the upper tension disks.  Those disks are responsible for putting drag on your thread, so that your thread is always feeding at the same speed, regardless of how well the spool was wound at the factory.

The disks are right behind the numbered dial on the front of the machine.  You can take this whole upper tension apart.  In fact, I recommend that you do so once you and your machine have developed a  rapport.  However, only a few owners' manuals will show you how to do it, and so you have to be able to remember what order the parts came off in, so you can put them back in the same order.

The good thing about taking the tension all apart is that on an older machine there's just no telling what you may find in there.  I found an entire famiy of lederhosen-wearing, tuba-playing, beer drinking, red-necked gremlins in the upper tension of a Singer 401.  Gosh, what a mess!

They had put oil in between the tension disks which had solidified on the disks, so that the thread didn't just have drag on it, it actually stuck to the disks!  That necessitated taking the tension apart and cleaning the disks with a solvent: WD-40.

The easiest way to clean the upper tension disks is to use a brush between them.  That will pull any lint or loose pieces of thread out of there so the tension has a chance to do what it's supposed to do.  And for this cleaning, you don't even have to take the assembly apart.

The main thing about the upper tension, really, is to be familiar with it.  The lowest settings should leave the thread the loosest with the least amount of drag on it.  The highest settings should make the stitches tighter.

There really isn't a whole lot more to maintaining an old mechanical machine.  But the all around best advice I would give any home sewer, experienced or inexperienced: take a sample of your fabric before you ever sit down to begin your project, and practice on that sample.  Play with the upper tension.  Play with it a lot.  Find the best needle to use with that fabric.  See how the fabric and your sewing machine get along.  Use several different stitches if your machine has them. 

By the time you finish playing with your sample, your fabric and your sewing machine should play together like two happy kittens.  And with no gremlins in sight, your machine should purr like a kitten for a lot of years to come.