Tin Lizzie 18 - Still having stitching issues. HELP!
I have had my TL 18 for 10 months and it's still not working right. My dealer came out a few months ago and replaced one of the encoders (the other one was replaced right out of the box).
What the machine was doing was having issues when it stitched. What would happen is I would take a group of stitches. They look beautiful on the top. I would look underneath and the bobbin stitches looked fine. But there would be a huge mess of thread from the top thread where it was just an excessive amount of top thread on the bottom (does that make sense?). After I got the new encoder, rather than having 2" of this mess, I would only get 1 stitch with a huge mess every foot or so.
My rep just replaced the tension assembly or something like that, and I just tried using it. I also just replaced the needle. Now I'm getting 2-3 stitches with a moderate mess on the bottom (that's improvement, right?).
When the rep was here, he showed me (for the first time, mind you) how to set the tension. He told me that when the foot is down, you should have to really forcefully tug on the (top) thread, bending the needle back, to get the thread to advance. Which I had never set it that tight, I just used a test patch and adjusted until the stitches looked "right".
Another issue I'm still having is when I make a curve, the bobbin thread shows on the top. The top thread makes a nice curve, but then the bobbin thread has little dots slightly outside of the curve. Which makes me think it's a tension
issue (top tension too high), so I lowered it 2 total turns and it's still showing the bobbin thread on the curves. I can keep turning it down, but that seems like a lot with minimal improvement, and I'm running out of test area on
my quilt top.
Any ideas or suggestions would be helpful. I'm going to call the rep again, but I have very little faith in them. I'm beyond frustrated with this and just want my machine to work right! Any help is appreciated. I did post on the TL Yahoo group. Thanks!