Originally Posted by Country Quilter
Well, hubby and I bought a book on sewing machine repair instead...spent about the same amount of money as it would have cost for an hours work at the shop.
Found this out by reading the book and did this to my machine and it works fine now.
There is a plate UNDER the machine with two screws.....I took those screws out and removed the plate and found THIS!!! (see photo) Cleaned that out, put some grease on the gear that is under there (just a drop) and put the plate back on and VOILA!!!! The machine worked FINE after that!!!
SO....before you spend $50 or more at your machine shop, try that!!! CLEAN and oil it!
And oddly, one of those combs used to dye hair (with a pointy edge and brush on the other side) works great to clean out and oil all at the same time. The brush gets a little oil on it from cleaning and voila it oils as it goes and gets oil in those hard to reach areas. But when you use the pointed edge to "dig" something out, don't jab it in, you might hit something you don't want to hit, just use it gently to pull it out of those hard to reach areas. I use a little starch to make it sticky on that end and it just sort of grabs it.