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.