By A Thread

As I mentioned in a previous instalment, my industrial sewing machine came threaded with a thread not really suited to the machine, a pink Tex 27 cone thread, commonly used on overlock or coverstitch machines. The label doesn't say what fiber it is, but by the feel of it it's either a cotton or cotton-poly thread. Easy to sew with, but not exceptionally strong when it comes to any tasks beyond basic garment sewing.

So before I get off the ground with any major projects, I first need to get some more appropriate thread, and I chose a variety pack of neutral Tex 70 threads, which is one of the most popular sizes of industrial threads.

The pink thread is the old stuff, the black thread is the new stuff. Hopefully it's not too hard to see that there's a very substantial difference between them.

The stitches with the new thread look not too bad.

These are some 6mm and 3mm stitches in some paper towel I had laying around. Also my blurry feet in the background. It doesn't look too bad, but there's a problem.

This is what it looks like when the hook only grabs one of the three thread plies. If I were sewing in any heavier material, this would have broken the one ply it did hook, and then that broken ply would snag on the needle and probably cause the other plies to snap just a few stitches further on.

So why did this happen? The most common variety of Tex 70 thread is what's known as "bonded nylon", which is a 3-ply nylon thread that's coated with a sort of glue that sticks all three plies together so that it sews smoothly and you don't have this issue with the plies splitting apart like this. However, nylon doesn't have good UV resistance, so I opted for what I thought was a bonded polyester.

But it turns out that it's not bonded, it's just polyester, which makes it half useless for machine sewing. Only half, though, as it still works fine as bobbin thread, which is what I'll likely use it for from here on out. I'm a little grumpy about this, but also I can buy 6 kilometers of bonded nylon for $15 so I'm not really losing any sleep over this.

In much less disappointing news, I added a small power strip to the sewing table to plug in both the clutch motor as well as the sewing light. This makes it so that I won't accidentally start the motor when I knee the on/off switch, and also gives me a single switch to turn off everything at once.

It also frees up an outlet on the wall, which is nice.

Silver Showers

Not golden showers, those are different.

When I purchased this fine abode, with it came a reasonably nice shower head in the ensuite bathroom.

It had seen a few years before the sale, and has certainly seen a few years since, and it was finally getting to the state where dousing it with CLR would no longer revitalize its youthful vigour.

I had fully intended to purchase an identical replacement, or one near enough to such, as I had no issue with its functioning, but I came to discover one harsh truth about the world we live in: name-brand shower heads are expensive.

So instead of the Home of Despots, I made my way to the Home of Bezos, and picked up this little number fresh off the boat from the mysterious markets of the orient.

I've been enjoying the rain shower head that's installed in the main bathroom, and the design with the grid of water nipples seems to be highly resistant to mineral buildup, so I'm hoping that despite its bargain price, this shower head will last me a fair few years.

Now the keen eyed among you will notice a critical part is missing from this installation: the government mandated flow restrictor, but fear not! I was not short-changed in my shipment, as the box did contain the vital earth-saving device.

Here you can see it in my very own hands, shortly before I definitely, totally installed it per the directions included in the box. However, in my eager haste to comply with this legal government mandate, I clumsily forgot to take an "after" picture showing it screwed securely in place. So, you must forgive me, and merely use your imagination to picture it doing its job reducing the shower flow as our honourable elected officials intended it to do.

The Little Dutch Boy

I had suspected for a while now that one of the drain pipes in the crawl space was leaking. Back in the summer when I redid the front of the house and uncovered the crawlspace vents there, I noted a bit of an off odour near the front door, and despite my best efforts to do nothing at all about it, the odour did not dissipate on its own. I also started to have trouble with flies gathering around the front door, which made it very inconvenient to get my mail.

So eventually I resigned myself to calling a plumber. No doubt I was physically and intellectually capable of performing the work myself, but I was rather unwilling to crawl down through the mud to reach the source of the problem. Thus, it made all the sense in the world to pay someone else to suffer that indignity.

The plumber was able to show me that, indeed, the drain pipe that connected the kitchen and laundry drains had a decent sized hole in it, no doubt caused by the improper slope (the leak was at the low point of a sag in the pipe) combined with a poor choice of materials (galvanized steel... really?) and the fact that the water softener (which I removed long ago) had been discharging its brine down that drain.

Anyway, the plumber and his assistant were able to remove the offending pipes and replace them with shiny new ABS with about 6 hours of labour from the both of them. The total bill, including materials and taxes, was $2800, which is a fair chunk, but a price I was willing to pay.

I didn't opt to pay for their offer of soil remediation, though, where they would attempt to clean up the wet soil in the crawl space by some method I wasn't interested in hearing anything about. For one thing, the leaking water was only kitchen/laundry water; basic grey water that is perhaps the least offensive thing one can find inside a drain pipe. For another, the crawl space is still, despite my best efforts, subject to occasional flooding in the winter, so it would make no difference if they cleaned up the wet soil now, as the sum total of all the dirt down there would likely soon be soaked anyway. And third, it's literally just wet dirt. I couldn't care less about it being down there. It will dry in due time, then get wet again, and then dry out once more.

With that offer dismissed, I did at least accept their proposal to douse the area in pine sol, at no extra charge. I figured there would be no downside to this option.

That is, at least, until the pine sol fumes seeped into the house. That stuff has a very, very powerful aroma. I think I would have preferred the slightly musty soil smell.

Thankfully the smell has mostly faded now, and we're pretty much back to normal again. The plumber did advise that some other pipes may be suffering a bit of corrosion, so I'll be keeping an eye on the situation and making plans to get a full replacement done at some point in the future.

But for now, the job is done.

An Uplifting Experience

When last we left off, we had just replaced the presser foot on my industrial sewing machine. But, a foot that stays forever planted on the ground is of little use, so we need to make it go up and down.

The machine came equipped with two mechanisms to raise the presser foot: there was the usual hand lever behind the head, which worked ok but was a little stiff, and a foot-operated pedal which was really not working well at all. A little cleaning and lubrication got the hand lever working ok, but the pedal would need more love.

The most obvious problem was how the pedal was connected to the machine.

The pedal came adorned with this incredibly flimsy chain. I'm pretty sure I've seen gold necklaces that were more resilient than this overcooked wet noodle. It could barely move the mechanism without the links stretching open and falling apart (many of which you can see on the floor).

The other problem was with how it was attached to the machine.

This is the back side of the machine, and the long black arm with the pivot in the center is what the foot pedal is meant to connect to. On the one end, it simply lifts the presser foot up, and on the other end the chain leading down to the foot pedal or knee lift pulls that end down, and in the middle is the pivot.

First off, the pivot had almost completely unscrewed itself from the back of the machine, but that part was easy enough to fix. I also took the opportunity to clean and lubricate it.

The more important part is how the chain had been connected to the arm: it had been fed up through a speed hole in the table top, and then hooked through one of the holes in the end of the arm. This is not how the mechanism is meant to be driven. If you look carefully, you'll see that there's a rod connected to that end of the lever, and the other end looks like this.

That little chrome eyelet is what the pedal or knee lift is supposed to pull on, and they even have a corner cut out of the drip tray so that the linkage can pass down through the table top inside the footprint of the machine's column.

However, no hole had ever been drilled in this table top for such a lift.

Before I drilled one of my own, I decided to move the head forwards on the table to the other set of bolt holes. I don't know why two of them had been drilled barely an inch apart from each other, but given that the belt tension adjustment on the motor was nearly bottomed out, I figured the frontmost set of holes made more sense to use.

So, the first task is to remove 3 of the 4 bolts.

We leave one bolt in place so that the machine doesn't slide completely off the table before we can pivot it around to make sure it's fully supported.

Then we can remove the final bolt, shift the machine forward to the other set of holes, fit that bolt back in place, swing the machine back, and secure the rest of the bolts.

And the repositioning is complete. I also took the opportunity to clean up some of the old, sticky oil from the table top.

Now that the machine is in its final location, we can deal with the task of drilling a hole for the lift mechanism.

I'm not a huge fan of spade bits, but they're at least cheap.

I had planned to drill a small divot on the top side, then follow up with the brad point bit to locate the hole on the bottom side and finish the drilling from there.

But unfortunately I ran into a little bit of a clearance issue.

Well, I tried. Anyway, I continued with the spade bit from the top side, until the point just poked through the bottom.

Then I could center up on the pilot hole and finish the last bit of the hole from the underside, avoiding the usual tearout.

I ended up with more chips up top than I would have liked, but thankfully managed to avoid spraying any sawdust up inside the machine, which I had been a little worried about at first.

The drilling didn't go perfectly, of course. I did manage to get hung up on a "spinning washer of doom" part way through the hole when one of the layers of plywood delaminated.

You gotta stop drilling, dig that thing out, then you can finally continue making the hole.

Anyway, with the hole drilled we can begin assembling the new linkage.

At first I thought it was odd that these quick links would come as a 3-pack, but I realized that it's actually the perfect number to have when you're putting together a cable and turnbuckle assembly. What was more odd, though, was the steel ball that fell out of one of the quick links when I unscrewed it.

Also featured in this photo is part of a broken screw that was stuck inside the table, and somehow managed to survive the trip home and me struggling to get the machine into my house.

I hope it wasn't an important screw.

Well never mind that, first up we need to put one of the quick links to work inside the machine, since I don't intend to permanently join the cable to the rod here.

Next we make up one end of the cable by feeding it through the ferrule and around the thimble.

Getting this to sit tight can be a challenge, but I've found that clamping it into a vise can really help.

And with a couple of pinches from the swaging tool, the end of the cable is secure.

But we're not done yet, we still need to deal with that free end before it slices us open.

And once again, the death wheel comes to the rescue.

You probably don't want to do this with a critical, load bearing cable, since you'll likely nick the side of the main cable, but for an application like this it's totally fine.

And here we can see it threaded into place.

I was concerned that the hardware might end up a little too bulky under the machine, but it seems to be sized reasonably for the space, and shows no signs of catching or hanging on anything.

Next up, we spend at least 30 minutes trying to figure out how to thread the quick link into one of the holes on the pedal.

Honestly it's like one of those brain twister puzzles.

But with that solved, we can add the turnbuckle and the second quick link and size up the cable, marking it at the center of the bend.

Then it's another visit two the swager and the death wheel and it's all in place and ready to go.

In hindsight I possibly could have made the cable a little bit longer to give myself more slack in the turnbuckle, but this works just fine and if it becomes an issue sometime down the line I can always make up a new cable.

Anyway, I'm happy to knock another job off the to-do list for this machine. Every day this thing is getting better and better, and I can't wait to start putting it to work!

I'm Putting My Foot Down

Pretty much as soon as I brought home the Juki I noticed something was a little off about the presser foot.

It's got some wear and tear, and some pretty gnarly looking scratches and gouges, which is peculiar for something that, in theory, spends most of its life in contact with fabric.

But what really seemed off was this.

Presser feet aren't really supposed to be shaped that way. My guess is that someone got frustrated at trying to get the machine to feed over bulky sections of fabric and this was their solution.

Taking it off revealed that the underside was pretty worn and chewed up too.

Those chowder marks are what happens when you run the machine too much with no fabric under the foot.

Anyway, a new foot isn't too expensive, so let's swap one in.

This is what a proper presser foot is supposed to look like.

And no, I have no idea why the colour temperature went weird in this one photo.

The glam shot looks good, though.

Anyway, up next is the belt guard, the piece that's supposed to keep this bit of machinery from turning you  into Astar.

The machine came with a belt guard, sort of, but the two pieces didn't really fit together properly.

The ample screw slots on the guard were not quite ample enough to reach the threaded inserts on the mounting bracket, and there was a little tab of metal on the guard that also interfered.

Well, that little tab of metal is easy enough to deal with.

And as for the screw alignment problem, that has solutions too.

This fits together much better now.

Just ignore that the screws are mismatched. It's fine, don't worry about it.

The important thing is that the belt is now guarded, and all my limbs are still safely attached.

The Green, Green Grass

My emotional support lawn is responding nicely to the fertilizing and overseeding.

Perhaps a bit too nicely. I was intending to leave it for 6 weeks before mowing it, so that the new grass shoots could get better established, but it was getting to be a wee bit much.

Thankfully, those new grass shoots were looking pretty decent, so I decided to give it a go. Or give it a mow, as the case may be.

I think this is the first time I've ever managed to fill the bag on my mower since the day I bought it. Usually I only get maybe a handful of clippings.

In theory I could mulch instead of bag, but meh, whatever.

Anyway, it's mowed now, and I think this might even help the new grass a little as the old stuff won't be shading it out as much. Time will tell, I suppose.

It Cleans Up Nicely

The first batch of parts have arrived, and so we can do a little bit more work freshening up the sewing machine. First, and perhaps most importantly is sewing machine oil. This bottle should last me a lifetime.

Or several, if I'm talented.

I got some cork to freshen up the treadle, but decided that I'm going to use this roll for refreshing a tool box, as it's a bit thinner than the original cork and I later discovered that you can buy a pre-cut cork pad that fits exactly in this spot.

But that toolbox is a project for another day.

One thing that industrial machines often lack is a built-in light, and so since the arm of the machine casts a pretty big shadow, adding a light is an important upgrade.

This gooseneck light is pretty nice, and sticks very firmly to the chassis of the machine by way of a magnetic base.

It's a pretty nice light, though I also purchased a pre-cut LED strip light that I might mount to the underside of the arm.

I could then use the magnetic lights on my domestic machines, which do have built-in lights, but the more the merrier.

One important maintenance item for an industrial machine is the drive belt.

The belt that came on this machine isn't half bad, but it was feeling a little bit dry and a new belt is only $7.

So on it goes.

Next up are needles. Picking the right needle for the job can make all the difference in the world.

The machine came equipped with a 120/19 size needle, which is good for medium weight threads in the range of Tex 70 to Tex 90.

And the thread that was left over in the machine is...

Tex 27, a pretty standard lightweight domestic serger cone thread. That's quite a small thread for this size needle. Generally you'd use an 80/12 or 90/14 for this weight thread. Here's a 90/14 needle next to the 120/19 that was in the machine, for comparison.

With the 90/14 needle installed, the stitch quality in a folded paper towel looks pretty good.

I just happened to have a folded paper towel on hand.

Of course, the reason I had paper towels on hand was that the machine desperately needed cleaning. For example, the bobbin compartment was full of lint and glitter.

I got quite a bit of gunk pulled out, though certainly not all of it. One can never truly eliminate all glitter.

But this gunk was nothing compared to the amount of lint and glitter up in the arm.

It's unfortunately a bit difficult to see in this picture, but there's a lot of crap caked on here with gummed up oil.

This is only about half of the grime I pulled out.

Admittedly from the outside it doesn't look much different, but it's what's inside that counts.

And that's about enough work for today.