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.