Walking Shoes

So we're back on the Consew 18 again today.

When I got the machine the needle bar thread guide was nowhere to be seen. Or, well, most of it was nowhere to be seen. There was still a tiny chunk of it remaining, plus the screw holding it in place.

Luckily these thread guides are very cheap, and the replacement one just arrived.

And so on it goes.

It's not an especially critical part, but it is good to have, since it keeps the thread in line with the groove on the needle.

Anyway, that's not the only parts that arrived, I also got the new feed dog, needle plate, and inner and outer walking foot.

The machine came to me with what I'm gonna call the "mattress kit" installed.

It's basically a feed dog and foot set that primarily grips the fabric on the right-hand side of the needle, leaving a lot of clearance on the left to be able to feed in welting cord, or get right up close to the edge of a mattress to sew it closed, or sew in zippers, or whatever else. This is all fine and dandy, but for the projects I have in mind I'm not always going to be dealing with a lot of seam allowance, so having the feed be primarily on the right hand side of the needle isn't going to necessarily work too well.

You can see in this photo how the 56882 outer foot will only grip to the right side of the needle, whereas the 56896 foot spans both sides. The 56883 and 5792 inner foot are also slightly different, but the changes there aren't notable enough to point out here (mostly the left side of the foot is bevelled so as to provide clearance for welting).

So the new feed dog is pretty easy to install, just two screws and it's in place.

And then the needle plate is installed over top of it.

This needle plate is green because it's teflon coated. It only costs a few dollars more than a standard steel plate, and makes sewing sticky materials like vinyl way, way easier, even given the fact that this is already a walking foot machine.

Now we just need to install the new feet and... uh...

You know, it occurs to me that the mattress kit comes with 5 parts, not 4. There's the feed dog, the needle plate, the inner and outer presser foot and... a shorter outer presser foot bar.

Part number 6319 instead of 4744. Note that these are all Singer part numbers, the corresponding Consew part number for the regular outer presser foot bar is 6335.

Well fiddlesticks. At least the good news is that this part is still available, though for a bent piece of metal with 3 holes in it, it's not exactly cheap.

But what is cheap is this little round red piece of felt, which sits over the upper thread guide.

Its whole purpose in life is to simply allow you to stick a spool of thread on this post rather than feeding thread from a cone in a thread stand, without wearing a hole in the paint here.

Will I ever actually use it? Who cares, it cost me 23 cents.

Well, I thought I'd have this machine sorted today, but it looks like it'll be at least one more blog post before it's all set up the way I want it.