Rain and Stockings. An Adventure in Sewing Machine Repair

It has been raining here in Iowa.  Over the last several days, it has maintained a gloomy "threatening" atmosphere of rain, even though it only started late in the afternoon on Sunday. I can not really stress enough how lucky we were that the rain held off for the entire race on Saturday, especially since it rained on us on Friday.   But rest assured, rain.  Here in Iowa.   For the rest of the week, at least.

I have mixed feelings when it comes to the rain.  The rain keeps me mostly inside and away from sidewalk chalk or any other outdoor activities.   And even then,  when we run and bike ( which we did this morning)  I dislike being wet and cold... even when we get the entire trail to ourselves and get to experience the great outdoors  in the cool temps. 

On the other hand, I have been wishing for rain for a while now.   First,  it clears off the sidewalks of all the chalk we had put down over the last month.   Second.  Mushrooms!   They usually sprout up after a good soaker.   And finally,  It allows me to focus on "Indoor things" that I have been putting off for the last few months.  I should also note that the entire area, including the rivers, could use the moisture.  The river is pretty low this year.  As are many of the local ponds.   A little bit of rain would certainly help. 

We have been busy with stockings over the last couple days.  We did 15 stockings yesterday and 7 today,  with a whole bunch more "show and tells"   Cheryl is a little concerned about our future, since the "pandemic"has made our dreams of "getting back into the work force" seem pretty unlikely and futile at the moment.  This means we have to make as much money over the next few months as possible! Even with the inevitable rise of Inflation!

The Button Machine

But back to reality!  I was on my last stocking yesterday when my button machine stopped working.  I call it the "button Machine" because I have modified the Singer Tradition to do exclusively buttons.  And everything is "just how I like it."   Imagine my horror when it stopped working!

Well, with the rain keeping me inside, what better time than the present to take the machines apart and do a little upkeep and maintenance.   The button machine is pretty much built out of spare parts already, so I simply had to take it apart to see which "wrong" part was failing.  

Turns out, it was the Spring for the hand wheel.  ( I actually don't know  most of the real names to most of the parts on the sewing machine.)   It works like this:  When you step on the pedal, the spring tightens around the main shaft, causing the machine to push the needle up and down. The Spring also allows the shaft to "slip" if the needle hits something hard;  Protecting the gears from any permanent damage. When you want to thread a bobbin, you slide the bobbin winder over and it moved a stopping arm over to keep the spring from tightening.  This causes the bobbin to wind and keeps the main drive shaft from spinning.   

I had "fixed it" so that the spring was permanently tightening around the shaft.  Meaning: every time the bobbin threader was winding bobbins, the shaft would continue to move.  Annoying!  Yes, but functional.   I was forced to do this because the spring became unwound a long time ago, and I was forced to shorten it. Eventually, I inherited it from Cheryl and made it mine.  

All that explanation to say, I simply bent the spring back into shape and put everything back together.  It works WITH the bobbin part working properly.  Why I had not fixed it properly before I can only imagine was because I did not have any tools 10 years ago. ( Yes! It has worked all this time, sewing thousands of buttons each year without any hitches.  Pun intended!) Not to bad for a non-sewing Machine Mechanic...

The shop cats continue to "help" and the rain continues to fall.  Cheryl has another run coming up and I wanted to blog a little between  races.  Seems like I have only been blogging about her lately.   but that only means that nothing terribly exciting has been happening in the mean time.   If you managed to read this entire boring post, I applaud you. Writing about sewing machine repair to non-sewers is similar to a surgeon describing brain surgery! Or a Computer nerd talking about Binary code! Your eyes glass over, you nod in agreement, and then slowly move away to another conversation you can  actually follow. 

But thanks for bearing with me.   Perhaps something more fun will happen this week and I will be motivated to actually blog about it.   In the mean time, thanks for stopping in.