miriam

I won one today. I have an old black Japanese 15 universal. It was a flood rescue. The tension was missing and it was locked up good. I got it moving and tried to cobble together a tension - no luck with the tension. The other day I cleaned up an old blue Japanese 15 Mercury - under it is stamped Brother on one of the metal parts.... Any way I didn't like the way the tension on it worked. I puttered around cleaning and dis-assembling and re-assembling the tension on the Brother today. Figured out the pin was the wrong length so I pulled out the black Universal and swapped. I'm not sure which nose plate goes to which machine at this point but they both work now. I used the instructions from http://www.tfsr.org/ - that has some really good info on tensions. HOWEVER. If you are having to improvise it doesn't go into how long the pin should be. Some pins are longer than others. I also noticed that the tension on the Brother had been oiled and then it dried so it was a bit gummy inside. I also noticed while improvising that the tension needs to have spacers so that the pin actually hits effectively. I finally got those two machines working nice so I got out another machine that had no tension and thought since those two got fixed maybe my luck would hold out. I have a Singer 185 that came with out a tension. I have stuck about every combination of tension parts I have in there. I gave up and pulled one off a junk plastic machine recently found and guess what... it fit just right. So I raised the feet but the tension didn't move. I took the thing back out and put it back in. No luck. Then I opened up the door and noticed that the hitter is riding right on past the pin about half the time. It is either bent or the pin is crooked. I think it is what it was doing before and I didn't catch on because I didn't look in there while I was trying to make it work. Anyway, I think I need just the right nail.