515 4-Thread Safety Stitch

Double needle, double trouble

Well one of the assignments that is given to my students is to sew a pair of jeans. It is a great learning process, they learn how to do a zipper fly, button holes, patch pockets, and a slew of other techniques that can be used on other applications and garments. Most of the work is done with a 515 and a double needle lock stitch. For that double needle, we have a pretty nice Durkopp machine. An awesome German machine, real straight forward and easy to thread and super durable. But like the saying goes, "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong" and there were a few set backs. The first being the bobbin pin that holds the bobbin/bobbin case in place snapped off. Someone didn't thread the bobbin correctly, and a bunch of the top needle thread wrapped underneath the bobbin, wrapped around the pin and broke the stainless steal piece clean off. Normally a typical 24-27 tex thread wouldn't break that pin but working with 60 tex, you are looking at a pretty hefty force. $365 later it was fixed and I stressed to the students how crucial it is to thread the bobbin correctly and push that pin tab down.
Smooth sailing until this beauty happened:

Oh yes, that pin was in the upright position and look at that nicely wound birds nest of thread. This is no fun to fix, always keep a nice sharp knife or razor blade with you. Just shy of an hour to fix that, just remember, if you are in a rush it is best to take your time and make sure everything is threaded properly, it'll help in the long run. Through my experience about 70% of the problems are due to improper threading.

Sewing Sabotage

Industrial sewing machines are great, fast, efficient, and are able to handle a wide range of fabrics and human errors. So I have seen my fair share of broken needles, 301 lock stitches with thread wrapped around the bobbin pin due to the lack of a bobbin... The usual but last semester there was a great deal of over the top repairs I had to do. This happens because people aren't trained properly and it leads to a drop in productivity, money spent to get new parts, and some times injuries.
The first problem is with a 406 bottom cover stitch machine. Someone didn't thread the bottom looper correctly which led to a huge wad of thread I had to take a razor blade to.

Due to that wad up and improper threading of the looper, the bottom cover stitch didn't catch. Because the person that tried to fix it thought the looper was threaded correctly became frustrated and kept sewing creating a wad of thread right by the needles. And out of anger someone tried to fix it by prying at it with a screw driver bending a stainless steal presser foot and not pictured are the 2 needles that person broke too. My students know not to try to fix anything, and no one else was using a cover stitch machine so my suspicions were pointed towards someone. This was a fairly cheap fix, I replaced the needles, cut out all the thread from the moving parts, threaded the looper correctly and was able to bend back the presser foot. It took me about 4 hours but it was a good learning experience.

Welcome!

Hello everyone,

This is a blog dedicated to my struggles and frustrations down in the sewing lab. Some funny stories, some moments of great insight, some videos about threading, common machine problems, and a fair deal of me rambling on.
A brief background, I am a teachers assistant down in a sewing lab at a fairly large university. I have had this position for 3 years, and no I am not a graduate student I am a senior. This sadly is the first year I didn't get paid due to budget cuts but they decided to hire a grad student who does absolutely nothing but break machines (I will get to this in later posts) and reaps the rewards of my hard work. As you can imagine there is a good deal of hostility, anger and as one student stated "You have a pretty big F-off bubble." But I still worked hard keeping order in the lab and fixing everything that was broken, while the grad student sat in her office...