Never Underestimate The Problem

In March I did a post about what happened to my sewing machine. It was the first time wen I took the case off to oil the parts. That was my initial plan but soon this turned into an hour of cleaning. That was when I learned I need to clean my sewing machine regularly, if I want to use it for a long time.

Then I learned that if something goes wrong with the thread, if the tread breaks and is caught inside, you need to act, you need to take off the cover and see what happened.

It's been four months since than and nothing bad has happened. I need to mention that I'm cleaning the sewing machine at the beginning of every month and believe me, that is necessary. I'm working with denim almost exclusively and the amount of fluff that is gathering when the bobbin compartment is placed, is shocking.

Today the thread broke again and I knew right away that I need to repeat the procedure right away. I took off the case and this is what I saw. As you can see, there's not much tread caught there, so I said this is going to be easy. I just take those few pieces and after that I'm good to go.

Well, I couldn't have been more wrong. First of all I could not take out any of those thread pieces, no matter how I tried. Those metal pieces are not loose, you can't just pull the thread out. That's why I started rotating the balance wheel backwards to see if I can make some progress. And I did.

I must admit, my arm and hand was already hurting from that much rotating but slowly it became obvious that rotating the balance wheel backwards is the only way I can take out that caught thread. It took me some time though.

Once piece of thread of almost 80cm! That is what I had to take out of there. Now go back to the first photo and see how much was out. Not more than 1cm. Imagine the rest, filling out the space between two pieces. This should never happen as this is how you can destroy your sewing machine. If you use the machine like that you risk damaging these pieces. Once these are worn out, you can kiss your machine good bye. Maybe you can replace the pieces if yours is a recent model, that's the happy solution but if you have an older sewing machine and can't get the necessary pieces, you can buy another one.

So be a good seamstress and clean your sewing machine regularly 🙂