Friday 26 July 2013

Sewing Machine Maintenance - feed dogs and a broken needle!

Well I had hoped to have a Finish for Friday.  I was happily making my paperpieced Doctor Who block of a space ship when my sewing machine had a meltdown.  It was not my Viking's fault - it was all mine.

I left a pin in my paperpieced block that as I was sewing along the seam became undone from the fabric and got stuck in the feed dogs. Really stuck.  Lodged between the feet and wouldn't come out stuck!

I yelled for Gordon's help as you do, hoping very much he would have a pliers or smaller screwdriver to take off the throat plate.  After much faffing about and very mumbled curses we got the throat plate off, went wow at the amount of lint that had gathered since I last cleaned it (in my defence I have been using my Husqvarna Viking a lot!) and freed the pin.  All good so far.

Throat plate back on, needle threaded, good to go?  Nope.  Feed dogs wouldn't move the fabric.  Slight panic, take whole thing apart again clean some more, break a needle, curse a little bit louder this time, turn it off and back on again - no joy.

Having no clue what to do next I decided to lower the feed dogs and raise them up again.  They wouldn't come up. 

At this point, about midnight, and thinking it was going to have to go in for repair I turned it off and unplugged it.  Instead of going to sleep I googled "feed dogs stuck after lowering" and the answer would you believe is to turn the hand wheel a few turns - voila magic - feed dogs popped back up and all is working again.

Now I hope to finish the block tonight, oil my machine, apologise to it for abusing it and promise as Gordon put it to me - to be more careful next time!



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