Originally Posted by boohoofish
I have been offered one of these and hope its worth the effort to 1-clean and rearrange the sewing room 2-use the space required to set it up 3-use my Janome 6600 without much difficulty 4-actually be able to do machine quilting without too much of an effort.
I feel its a good deal and I've been wanting a frame for quite a while but not able to afford one at the present time. But felt - I should ask all you "experts" out there.
Any help on this decision will be appreciated. Carol
These statements made my eyebrows raise, "3-use my Janome 6600 without much difficulty 4-actually be able to do machine quilting without too much of an effort."
You do realize that it isn't going to come with a personal instructor? Someone is going to have to setup the frame, put the 40+ pound sewing machine on it and hook up an extension cord for it, load fabric & batting on it, get it all tensioned properly--machine & fabric--and then teach yourself how to machine quilt.
I used an Elna 7200 (close cousin to a Janome 6500) on a B-Line Studio frame for many years. At first, I was afraid of it, though. I spent almost $1,000 on a box of wood & metal pieces. Hubby helped me put it together so that wasn't too bad. Then I hem-hawed around some more making leaders for it. (Since your's is used--maybe it will have the leaders). It came with very good instructions including suggestions for making leaders but I was intimidated. Me, the network engineer! Anyway, a friend of mine really wanted to play with it so she came over one day (by then I had all ready made the leaders but hadn't put them on) and helped me tape the leaders to the poles. She then shamed me into loading some crappy fabric and craft batting onto it and we played for a little while. I spent the next couple weekends making loops, swirls, writing my name and then actually drawing flowers and animals with it. I was hooked! My friend was still amazed by it and did eventually come over and load her baby quilt on it and doodled clouds all over it. She did not like loading, advancing & unloading the quilt, though so that one is all she ever did. She is a hand quilter and will always prefer the look of hand quilting over machine so that combined with her dislike of the other parts of machine quilting caused her interest to quickly disappear.
Since that time, I've moved my frame 3 or 4 times, extended it to 12 feet from 10 feet, added PC Quilter and Max Throat to it and then moved up to a Voyager 17 on a ProFlex frame. My biggest challenges have been old/bad/dry thread, a defective bobbin, poorly wound bobbins, bent needle and one hair pulling, cussing, gave up and took the machine to the doctor event was caused by a lint ball being sucked up into the tension disks and I couldn't get it out. I've also had tiny little snippets of thread get stuck in the bobbin area and then hide when I tried to figure out what was going on but that happens on & off the frame with my Elna.
Long story short--if you're expecting no difficulty and little effort to produce a quality machine quilted quilt--you're going to be disappointed. It takes lots practice & patience to produce those results. Some people just aren't into machine quilting or like my friend--won't like the way it looks no matter what. You won't know until you try though and if someone is giving you a frame--you've got nothing to lose.