Hello, again, Irene/Kittywolf. As I said when I replied to Carolines post about her 544 on Sat, the Lydia is infamous for having a cracked camstack and sometimes broken smaller gears, as Joe noted. She was the first Italian Necchi that they tried using plastic in and the combination of the plastic and metal parts in the camstack did not fare well together. One of our OSMG's theorized that the metal and plastic expand at different rates and over the years, the plastic surrendered. Over the years most of the camstacks developed cracks to one degree or another. If it's not cracked too badly she'll sometimes still do straight st and zz but no dec stitches. I have a Necchi list on Yahoo and some of our members do have intact Lydias but not many. Kim posted there today that she has one that is still intact. They used to be available from Allyn Int'l, the US Necchi distributor, but they stopped having them several years ago. Some of the replacements were black so if you find one with a black camstack, it might be ok.

The camstack used to be available but at about $90-120 but from Dan's post, they've gone up a lot!. If anyone would like to find out more about the vintage Italian Necchis, come join the group at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/necchisewingmachineclub/

We have a sister group, the Sewing Circle, where we have a manual and a service manual too for the Lydia. I cringe every time I see a Lydia on ebay and try to clue the seller into this so they'll check it out. One last week did and changed his listing to it being a parts machine. She's so beautiful it's a shame she has this problem. There are so many other vintage Italian Necchis that are wonderful so please don't think they're all like the Lydia!

Joe, several members have tried to glue the cs back together without success, don't know if the glue you mentioned would work or not. And, as you said, other machines have plastic gear problems too. I had a Singer 457 with a cracked gear, got the gear and was going to try to replace it but finally lost interest. Some of the Singer 600 series had metal gears and some had plastic so it was important to check these out before buying one.

whatever the reason for the plastic cams... its a shame either way! :(

When I was at Ray White's class a lady found camstacks made by someone in Wisconsin and they are good ones. I think Ray has the info. or maybe google