Singer 201-2 Clacking?
 

So I got Gideon's clear coat on (and made a huge gouge in it not more than 10 minutes after putting him all back together, FFFFFFFFF--), and he's back to sewing like a champ.

My problem is that when I was painting him I took out the presser foot, but left the needle arm intact (as I did NOT want to deal with timing him). However, now I'm not so sure that I've got the foot in right. When he sews, there's a loud 'clack clack clack clack' that sounds in time with the feed dogs coming up and hitting the presser foot. This makes me think that maybe I've got the foot too far down, but when I feed fabric through it's super easy to pull it faster than it's feeding by default, which makes me think it's not gripping the fabric enough.

I'm going to measure it for the recommended 16/64 of an inch or whatever it is that the manual suggests, but do people find it's easy to push fabric through faster than it feeds without pressure? >< Does this make sense?

You should not be able to pull the fabric along under the foot and over the feeddogs. It won't advance the fabric properly for sewing. Make sure the foot is pushed up all the way on the bar, and tighten the screw firmly. The feeddogs should be OK unless you loosened the screws holding them in.

Also you may need to adjust the pressure on the foot.

Brynn, to adjust the presser bar to the correct height, do the following:

1) Raise the presser bar, and loosen up the thumbscrew on top of the presser bar, to the point where the spring is not exerting any downward pressure, which would make it difficult to adjust.

2) Remove the faceplate. Then, using a screwdriver with the correctly-sized bit, loosen up the single screw that holds the presser bar in its bracket. Loosen it just enough that you can easily slide the presser bar up and down.

3) Turn the handwheel until the feed dogs are completely submerged under the needle plate.

4) Get a deck of playing cards and cut it exactly in half. No, this isn't a magic trick. When raised, the presser bar should be 19/64 of an inch from the needleplate; not an easy distance to eyeball, but I've found exactly half a deck of playing cards--that's 26 cards--is just about 19/64" thick.

5) Stick the half-deck of cards under the presser foot, and adjust the presser bar until the foot is resting firmly on the cards. The tricky part will be keeping the presser foot parallel with the feed dogs while you do this. Once you've got it correctly positioned, tighten up the screw in the bracket.

Now you should be good to go. Might take you a few tries to get the foot parallel with the 'dogs.

hope that helps,