On Jun 13, 10:47*pm, "newshound" wrote:
"Andy Dingley" wrote in message

...



On Jun 13, 10:05 pm, "newshound" wrote:
In search of one for SO's John Lewis JL 250 without much luck so far.
Anyone
know any good sites, or original manufacturer's name / model number?
Mainly
for cleaning / maintenance rather than "how to use".

Do you have a photo of the shuttle? For 99% of post-war machines they
use one of three types of shuttle, and everything works the same
within that. One is Singer (vertical axis, varied), one is cheap
Japanese (horizontal axis & the shuttle race is easily removable
without tools) and the best is Euro or high-end Japanese with a
horizontal axis. General weekly servicing is the same throughout -
brush / vacuum it clean, one drop of SEWING MACHINE oil down each of
the oil holes and keep oil & solvents away from anything plastic.
Silicone grease on the plastic gears annually, if you have to.

The "starter Haynes manual" for sewing machines is an old bright
yellow paperback by TAB books. Out of print for years, but it's a
favourite on the ebay hooky reprint circuit. It'll tell you how to set
timing for most machines.

There's also a lot of mileage in web searching for PDF service manuals
(esp Americans, which means the Scottish Singers too), even if you
have to pay a fiver.

IMHO, sewing machines are repaired by replacement with something
better, until you've worked up to a Pfafff / Bernina / Viking. Then
they don't need much more fettling anyway.

Thanks for the useful pointers. It's probably about 10 years old, vertical
axis shuttle. Sorry, not set up with any of the photo "drop boxes". I wanted
to make sure I'd located all the oil holes,

the mark 1 eyeball should do that. All oil holes need to be user
serviceable. If it uses plastic gears theyre probably prelubed.


also how to check the thread
tensions.

If the 2 threads meet halfway through the fabric, the tensions are
even. If the stitching is sloppy, theyre too low. If it puckers all
fabrics (not just lgihtweights) then its too high.

It's got me wondering what sewing machine oil is too; I'd guess
something like a 10 cSt straight mineral oil? Can't see much need for
additives, or any benefit from synthetic. Couldn't immediately locate a copy
of the TAB manual.

Machine oil. Baby oil is the same type of oil, with a tiny amount of
perfume added.


NT