The entire day today was lost in the black hole of sewing machine adjustment.<\/p>\n
I have a very spiffy nearly-new Juki double-needle machine. When I bought it, I had the nice man at the sewing machine store take a sample of my thread and fabric and set the machine up. I then took the machine to my shop, essentially left the settings alone, and happily sewed a mile or so of seams for my blimp without any significant difficulty.<\/p>\n
But Kevin’s fabric is much lighter weight than mine (1.1 oz per square yard as compared to my 1.9 oz.) As a result, there was a fair bit of puckering of the fabric along the seam. The bottom threads were also being pulled up through the stitch.<\/p>\n
Well, I said to myself, I know how to fix this. I’ll just reduce the top thread tension. This was the road to hell. A fiddle here, another fiddle there, and by the end of the day, neither of us could get the dang machine to sew more than a few inches of stitching without having the top thread tear or otherwise jam the mechanism. We both wanted to cry.<\/p>\n
I am told that this sort of thing is par for the course. Sewing machine technology has not changed much in nearly 100 years. I have an old Singer machine from the beginning of the last century. It looks remarkably similar to the brand new machine I purchased last year.<\/p>\n
Industrial sewing shops almost always have full-time mechanics to fiddle with their machines. Balloon repairs shops, which don’t usually have such people, often have many more sewing machines than people. Each machine is set up for a particular configuration (e.g. white thread on relatively heavy fabric vs black thread on relatively heavy fabric, etc.) and great pains are taken to avoid changing the settings once the mechanical house of cards is in place.<\/p>\n
So, we’re off to the sewing machine store at the crack of dawn tomorrow to have the nice man there set up the machine properly. We’ll leave it alone after that. Really we will.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The entire day today was lost in the black hole of sewing machine adjustment. I have a very spiffy nearly-new Juki double-needle machine. When I bought it, I had the nice man at the sewing machine store take a sample of my thread and fabric and set the machine up. I then took the machine […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.xlta.org\/buildlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.xlta.org\/buildlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.xlta.org\/buildlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.xlta.org\/buildlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.xlta.org\/buildlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.xlta.org\/buildlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.xlta.org\/buildlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.xlta.org\/buildlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.xlta.org\/buildlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}