Lucky Dog

On December 20, E made a Pilots 'n Paws flight for nine rescued dogs who began the day in North Carolina and ended up with rescue organizations in New Jersey and New York. Let's take a look at the passengers.

This mom and her four puppies were rescued by Pam. One of Pam's co-workers told her a family was planning to take these dogs to the local high-kill shelter the next day, so Pam picked them up and took them home with her and found a rescue group in New Jersey to take them.

These three siblings were rescued by a family who found them dumped in the middle of a road near their farm. The family kept them safe until Pam found a rescue group in New York to take them.

Lucky and his mom were living at an abandoned farm. Mike noticed the dogs and began stopping every day to feed them. As you can see, Lucky had a serious injury to his back. He also had a rip in his tongue. Mike got in touch with Pam, and Pam took Lucky home with her. The same New Jersey rescue group which agreed to take the mom and her puppies also agreed to take Lucky. Mike made arrangements to keep mom safe until she can make it to her rescue group in Connecticut.

Early in the morning on December 20, Pam loaded all nine dogs into her Jeep and headed for the airport in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, while Michele and her co-pilot Dennis flew to Roanoke Rapids from their home base in Maryland. All nine dogs boarded Michele's Cessna 172, and Michele and Dennis flew home where E met them. The dogs boarded E's Piper Cherokee and he flew them to New Jersey. The mom and her puppies and Lucky stayed in New Jersey with their rescue group, while the three siblings boarded Charlie's Piper Archer so he could fly them from New Jersey to their rescue group in New York.

In his first few days in New Jersey, Lucky had surgery to repair the rip in his tongue and to graft skin onto the wound on his back which the vet says was caused by a large bird. He is now in a good home where he will stay until his health issues are resolved and he's ready to be adopted. Here's how Lucky spent Christmas Day. A few days earlier, he wasn't able to lie on his back.

If you'd like to get the warm fuzzy reward which comes from helping an animal in need, take a look at the Pilots 'n Paws website.  

Button Foot Controller Repair

My Singer 401 has a button foot controller which I use by way of a knee bar. Until recently, the 401 had one speed – 100 m.p.h. It was polite enough to wait until I pressed on the knee bar before it started sewing. But, once it started, it went flat out all the time. E took it apart and fixed the problem and I thought I'd share how he did it.

You'll want to take a look at what Sid had to say about button foot controllers in his February 22, 2012 post at http://oldsingersewingmachineblog.com. Sid explains how the controller works and he has some great photos of the inside of the controller which will be helpful to you as you keep reading this post. (Thanks, Sid!)

E unscrewed the little feet on the bottom of the controller and took the top off the base. Someone had already removed the capacitor from between the two terminals, so it wasn't causing a problem. As you can see from Sid's photos, there's a screw which runs all the way through the white porcelain case which contains the variable resistance. The tip of the screw pokes up toward two little rectangular copper contacts and has a little plate attached to it. The little plate that's attached to the tip of the screw ought to touch the copper contacts when you have the button on the foot controller pressed all the way down. This gives you a resistance-free path from one terminal to the other and this is what gives you full speed.

When E looked inside my controller, he saw that when he pushed down on the t-shaped lever the button sits on, the little plate was touching the copper contacts well before the t-shaped lever was pushed all the way down. This explained the 100 m.p.h. speed.

To fix the problem, E slightly turned the screw clockwise which moved the little plate lower on the screw. He kept turning the screw until the little plate was barely touching the copper contacts when the t-shaped lever was pressed all the way down.

The button controller is back in the 401's cabinet and it works great. If you're having a similar problem, you might want to grab a screwdriver and give this a try. Happy Sewing!   

Singer 201

I'd been looking for a Singer 201 for a while and found one on craigslist which was advertised as not working. The seller was asking a fair price for a sewing machine which wouldn't sew, and E and I decided to buy it and see if we could revive it.

The machine came in a cabinet which held the original attachments and the manual.

We were planning to junk the cabinet, but decided to keep it because it's less than 30 inches long (with both leaves folded up) and we knew we could find room for it somewhere in the house. As you can see, E did a beautiful job of refinishing it.

Here's what it looked like when we brought it home. Lots of nicks, scratches, and dings.

And here's what it looks like now, after E refinished it.  Beautiful, eh?

Before we took the machine out of its cabinet, we did some preliminary diagnostic work. We plugged it in and flipped its little white toggle switch. The light came on and nothing smelled like it was burning, both of which were encouraging signs. Next, we tried to turn the hand wheel. It wouldn't budge. After ruling out a few other possible causes, we figured there must be a jam under the rotating hook assembly. Sure enough, when we removed the assembly, there was the tangle of doom. After we removed it (we needed tweezers and a flashlight) and put the assembly back together, we were able to spin the hand wheel.

The machine's cabinet had a built-in foot controller which didn't work. However, there was an after-market foot controller installed on the machine and when we very briefly pressed on it, the motor hummed and the needle bar went up and down.

Next, we took the machine out of the cabinet, blew the dusty bits out of its nooks and crannies, and polished all of the shiny parts. It looked good. But would it sew?

After we oiled and lubricated it, we took it for a test drive. There was a problem with the thread tension which ended up being a problem with the bobbin thread tension. After a little bit of adjustment, the thread tensions were balanced and the 201 was ready to sew.

This 201, which was made in 1950, purrs like a kitten and sews a beautiful stitch, plus the cabinet is gorgeous. I'm happy to add it to my herd.

Embroidery Machine + Refnished Sewing Machine Cabinet

I got a new toy a few weeks ago. No, it isn't another sewing machine. It's an embroidery machine! Hancock Fabrics had the Brother HE1 on sale and after I watched a HSN youtube video about this model, I decided to get one. It's a pretty basic machine, but the price was great.

The machine was easy to set up. All I had to do was snap the carriage onto the bed, plug in the power cord, and turn it on. It comes with enough gear to let you use it right away. Brother included a spool of bobbin thread plus several bobbins, three spools of upper thread, a 4x4 inch hoop and three sheets of stabilizer. There's also a plastic dust cover and a few miscellaneous bits (seam ripper, stylus, spool caps, etc.). The manual is thorough and easy to understand.

For my first project, I embroidered the name of one of my sister's dogs onto fabric I made into a reversible scarf. The combination of thin fabric and a high stitch count resulted in a lot of puckering.  Still, not too bad for my first try.

I bought 63 spools of thread from an eBay seller who shipped them really fast. The spools in my local fabric stores are $6 each (ouch!) so I was happy to find a good seller online. There are a lot of web vendors who have embroidery designs and alphabets available, and some of the designs are free. I was looking for some interesting, inexpensive alphabets and I found www.8clawsandapaw.com which sells them at reasonable prices.

I downloaded a couple of free designs onto my Mac, put them on a USB stick, blew the dust off an old IBM laptop running Windows XP (the Brother isn't compatible with Macs), and plugged the USB stick into the laptop. Then I connected the laptop to the embroidery machine using the cable which came with the machine, and dragged the designs from the USB stick onto the drive for the embroidery machine. When the designs showed up on the machine's LCD screen, I saved them there. You can only save a few designs to the machine, but you can load as many as you want onto your Windows-based computer and send them directly to the machine whenever you want to use them. The machine has a slot for embroidery cards, too.

I also downloaded an iPad app called StitchBuddyHD, which allows me to combine designs, change colors, re-size designs (within limits), etc. I played around with it quite a bit and I liked it enough get the Mac version of StitchBuddy which allows me to do even more things. (If you have a Mac, StitchBuddy lets you download it and try it for free a few dozen times.) StitchBuddyHD and StitchBuddy for Mac allowed me to change the colors of this plane's paint and eliminate a window. Then I combined the plane design with the numbers and letters built into the machine.

Even though I said I wasn't going to post anything about a refinishing project for a while, here I go again. E spotted a Copenhagen style Singer sewing machine cabinet at the local thrift store for $15. As you can see, it was in sad shape before E sanded it, stained it, and sealed it.

I want to use the cabinet for my embroidery machine, so E took some pegboard and a couple of 1/4 inch dowels cut into 1-3/8 inch pieces and made spool holders for the two top drawers. The bottom drawer holds stabilizer, the manual, and everything else that came with the machine. Yay!

Happy sewing and embroidering everyone.

Refinishing A Dining Room Table

I swear this is going to be the last post (for a while, at least) about refinishing anything. But, this is a little different from the other things I've posted about, which is why I decided to go ahead and share.

Earlier, we told you we moved everything out of the dining room so we could refinish the floor. When then time came to move everything back into the dining room, we took a hard look at the dining room table. The finish had lots of nicks and scratches and worn spots. This wasn't a surprise because we (mostly me) have put this table through a lot in the last 35 years. I've used it as my cutting table for dozens of sewing projects and as my work bench for stripping off old car seat upholstery and then cutting, sewing, and installing the new upholstery. It's where I start my seedling garden plants in the spring. We've used it to inventory boxes of old car parts. It's no wonder the finish on the table looked so bad.

E used his small orbital sander to take off the old finish, starting with the leaf in the middle. If you look closely at the upper edge of the section on the right, you can see how badly the finish was worn in places. Also, when you look at these "before" photos, notice how the finish hides the grain of the wood.

E had the entire table sanded in a couple of hours. It would have gone faster, except we did this inside so he had a bag on the sander to catch the dust and he had to stop sanding and empty the bag every ten minutes. Here's what the entire table top looked like when E finished sanding.

The next step was to stain the table to match the rest of the furniture. Even though we used the lightest mahogany stain we could find, we wiped it off almost as soon as we brushed it on. The directions on the can said to leave it on for five to fifteen minutes before wiping off whatever hadn't soaked into the wood. If we'd done this, the table would have been way too dark.  Here's the table with the stain on it.

Next came six coats of satin finish polyurethane coating.

It hardly looks like the same table, does it? There was a nice wood grain hiding under the old finish and the polyurethane will protect the finish for many years to come.

Upper Tension on a Lady Kenmore 89

Yesterday, I used my Lady Kenmore 89 to make a simple scarf.  I nearly drove myself nuts in the process because I couldn't get the upper thread tension adjusted properly.  On all of my other sewing machines, I adjust the upper thread tension by turning the little knob on the tensioner from 1 to 6, for example, until the tension is set properly.  The LK89's upper tensioner is marked 1 through 6, and even though I turned the knob all the way from 1 to 6 yesterday, it didn't make much of a difference in the upper thread tension.

This morning, I had one of those head slapping "how stupid could I possibly be" moments when E opened the LK89 manual and pointed to one of the drawings.  In the interest of sparing someone else the same crazy-making day I had yesterday, here's what the drawing pointed out:  To adjust the upper thread tension on the LK89, you don't just turn the knob from 1 to 6.  You turn it from 1 to 6 and then you keep turning it.  If you have your LK89 tension set at 3 and you move it to 4, you haven't done much of anything.  You need to move it to 4 and then keep turning (and turning) if you want to see a difference in the tension.

This is completely obvious when you look at the little hash marks on the top of the tensioner.  Notice in the first photo, above the number 6, you see four little hash marks.  In the second photo, above the number 6, you see only two little hash marks.  This is because I turned and turned and turned the tensioner knob, going past the number 6 a couple of times.  (I took the bottom cover plate off when I took the photo to keep it from acting like a mirror.  Also, you can ignore the blue tape -- I was using it as a seam guide.)

So, there you have it.  Now you know a couple of things you might not have known before you read this blog post:  First, you know how to adjust the upper thread tension on a Lady Kenmore 89.  Second, you know just how dense I can be.  

Refinishing a Pair of End Tables

Six months ago, I went to a church rummage sale and found two Lane end tables for $5 each.  They were dull and had lots of water rings on them, but I knew they would look great once they were refinished.  After a lot of wiggling and re-arranging and moving the front seats forward as far as possible, I managed to fit them into the back of my Chevy Spark and I hauled 'em home.

Recently, E sanded them and stained them and brushed on a couple of coats of satin polyurethane, and here's how they look.

Pretty nifty, eh?  I just listed my living room end tables on craigslist, and replaced them with these two.  Thanks, E!!! 

Refinishing a Parquet Floor

In 1985, we converted our screened-in porch to a dining room and installed a parquet floor.  In the following 29 years, the pad under the area rug rubbed just enough to scratch the heck out of the finish on the parquet.  Yesterday, when E and I moved all of the furniture, the area rug, and the pad out of the dining room, the floor looked like this.  That isn't dust or dirt in the center of the room.  It's the dull finish where the rug was.  Yikes!

We vacuumed the floor and scrubbed the parquet squares with a damp sponge.  Then, we applied a coat of satin finish polyurethane to the floor, one square at a time.  It took two hours to do the job and here's what it looked like when it was still wet.

This morning, it was dry enough to walk on and it looked like this.  Yay!

It should be completely dry in a week and then we can move things back into the dining room.

Refinished Sewing Machine Cabinet

A few months ago, I picked up a Singer 401.  It came in a photograin cabinet with one of those pop out bars which was supposed to support the open top of the machine but which actually allowed the top to droop at an alarming angle.  No matter what I did to the cabinet (cleaned it, stained the legs, etc.) it still looked cheap and flimsy.  Plus, it had a little wedge-shaped drawer which wouldn't hold much of anything and which wouldn't stay completely closed.  The 401 deserved a better cabinet.

After keeping an eye on craigslist for a while, I found a Singer 636 in a Copenhagen style cabinet.  I didn't want the 636, but I definitely wanted the cabinet.  A few days later, the 401 was at home inside its beautiful new cabinet and the 636 was shoved off to one side in my sewing room.

I didn't intend to keep the 636, but I took a look at the owner's manual and learned the machine would chain stitch.  Hmmm.  I didn't have a machine which would chain stitch.  The next thing I knew, I was cleaning and oiling the 636 and putting it through its paces and it ran great.  I put it back in the sewing room and decided to noodle around with it later when I could think of a project which would let me use the chain stitch.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago.  I was in a local thrift shop and saw a cabinet for $12.  I think the prior owner used the cabinet as a plant stand in a sunny window because there were lots of water rings on the top of the cabinet as well as huge water stains on the underside of the top.  Also, the hinges were rusted in place, and what was left of the finish was dull and faded.  It came with a knee bar and a foot controller which I knew I could use as a spare, and that's how I justified spending the twelve bucks.  I brought it home and after using a ridiculous amount of sandpaper and a small can of polyurethane, here's the new home of the 636.

Please ignore the dangling cords

It's shiny enough to reflect the painting
on the wall above it

Parquet front

One drawer

Tongue and groove closure

A wing on each side

I was kind of surprised when the cabinet ended up looking as nice as it did because it was such a mess when I started working on it.  Bringing it back to life was time-consuming, but not difficult.  I started with a stripper to take off what was left of the old finish.  Then I sanded everything down to bare wood.  Put on a coat of polyurethane and let it dry for 24 hours.  Sanded it.  Put on another coat of polyurethane and let it dry for 24 hours.  Sanded it a little more lightly than the previous time.  I repeated the process, sanding more and more lightly each time, until I was happy with it.  

I'm still looking for an excuse to use the chain stitch.  If you have a suggestion, please share. 

Feed Dogs on a Lady Kenmore 89

A few weeks ago, I found a Lady Kenmore 89 (516.891) at a thrift store. The machine was in a beautiful cabinet, came with the proper little hollow bench, and had the owner's manual and all the original attachments plus all the available (at the time the machine was made) optional attachments and the manual for those attachments. After making sure the machine itself was in decent shape, I decided to “think about it.” The minute I got home, I realized there was nothing to think about. It's a Lady Kenmore 89, for cryin' out loud! The next day, I was at the thrift store the minute it opened and bought the machine as soon as the cash register was up and running.

When I was cleaning the machine, I discovered the feed dogs wouldn't lower, which affected the machine's ability to make decorative stitches. There's a knob on the front of the machine which the owner's manual says is used to raise and lower the feed dogs. You push in the knob to lower the dogs and then you turn it to lock them in place. I could push and turn the knob, but the dogs didn't move. By peeking into the slot which contains the stitch length regulator, I could see the knob is connected to a small cable inside a housing. The cable runs from the knob, past the motor, and along the rear edge of the machine. The cable is connected to a bell crank which actuates a piston. The other end of the piston is connected to a cam follower which raises and lowers the feed dogs.

Once we saw where the cable ran, we could see what ought to be moving between the cable and the feed dogs. Even though I'd already oiled the machine, we oiled everything between the cable and the feed dogs again, making sure not to miss anything, and we let it sit for a day. No joy. We thought perhaps the cable was stuck inside the plastic housing, so we drizzled some oil on the top and bottom ends of the cable, pushed the knob in and out a few times, and let the machine sit for a couple of days, exercising the knob a few dozen times during those days. Still no joy. Nothing was moving.

We decided it was time to bring out the Kroil. If you haven't ever used Kroil, you might want to do a little internet research and see what you find. (We bought ours directly from Kano Labs because they were having a two for one deal online.) We put a few drops of Kroil on the top and the bottom ends of the cable and a drop of Kroil on the mechanical pieces between the cable and the feed dogs. The next day, the cable was moving inside the housing and the bell crank was moving, too. The piston, though, was still stuck.

E took a couple of wrenches and very slightly loosened the nuts on each end of the piston housing and the piston started to move, so he put a drop of Kroil on the piston either side of each nut, tightened the nuts again, and . . . . . Ta Da!!

The feed dogs now raise and lower with no problem. The machine sews beautifully – including all twenty decorative stitches.  Happy sewing, everyone!

We Have Mushrooms!

Three inches of rain in 24 hours gave us hundreds of mushrooms. These are a few of the gill-less varieties we've found in our yard in the past few years.  (Please don't eat mushrooms unless you are absolutely sure they aren't poisonous.)  

See the slug?