Another Janome

This morning I spent looking at the machine I got in on Thursday.  As the post title implies it is another Janome.  It's nothing all that fancy but comes with a flat-bed, hard cover, button-sewing foot, clear foot and rolled hemmer.  Considering they normally come minus accessories, flat-bed and cover I'm rather pleased!  The cover was filthy and looked like it had been sitting in a shed however much to my surprise the machine was fine.  There wasn't a speck of dust under the faceplate or top cover.

There is quite a bit of plastic in the machine, as can be seen below.

In order to get to the bobbin gears one has to take the free-arm cover off and then the gear cover.  I couldn't get the gear cover screws off and ended up cautiously prising one corner up just enough to check the gears weren't cracked and then bending it back down again.  In the image below the red circles are where the screws need to be removed to access the gears.

Once cleaned the machine looked very nice from both front and back.

(Did I mention it is dark where I work??!)

The stitch selection knobs are below.  I haven't actually sewn with the machine yet as I had other jobs to do but I hope to on Wednesday.

In other news, I ended up using the Janome XL-II for a project at work the other day.  I had to adjust the contacts in the pedal to get better speed control but once I did that she was a joy to use.  It is such a pity about her cracked gears, I really love her!

Fashion Mate 362 continued

The continuing saga of the Fashion Mate.  There is a particular type of Singer pedal that seems to have a bit of a fault.  I'm not sure if it's an age thing or to do with them being stored, because ones in constant use don't seem to have the problem, whereas only a couple that I've come across that have been stored have been OK.  I'm afraid I forgot to take a picture of the pedal so I've had to get this one from the internet, courtesy of sewingmachinenut.blogspot.com.

These pedals are found on a wide variety of Singer sewing machines from Hushmatics to Touch and Sews.  However they have a highly undesirable habit of going up in a nice little plume of smoke and a nasty smell.  Apparently it's the capacitors but it is a trifle disconcerting the first few times.  As you have probably guessed that's exactly what the Fashion Mate did to me when I started to sew with it, I had a feeling it might because it looked like it had been stored for a while.  All is not lost though, B's son is trying to get a new capacitor for me, which would be great!

Before I got as far as plugging it in though I did a thorough 'cosmetic job' on the machine and it looks really clean and shiny now:

A lot nicer than before!

                                                                            Before

Hopefully we can get capacitors for it and there will be nothing else wrong with it!