Pollytink

Hi, Caroline! It's me, Polly, who has the Necchi sm group on Yahoo. And hello, Irene/Kittywolf too. I have not so good news about the Lydia, unfortunately. She's infamous for having a cracked camstack and sometimes broken smaller gears. She was the first Italian Necchi that they tried using plastic in and the combination of the plastic and metal parts in the camstack did not fare well together. Over the years most of the camstacks developed cracks to one degree or another. If it's not cracked too badly she'll sometimes still do straight st and zz but no dec stitches. You can take the black end cover off by the handwheel and look inside. You have to remove a little screw in the knob to get it off first. Some of our members do have intact Lydias but not many. The camstack are or at least were available but at about $90-120. The small gears in that camstack compartment and in the bobbin case compartment may also be going bad. Irene just got one (she just joined our list) and found hers is badly cracked. I'll keep my fingers crossed that yours is still intact, at least enough to use her....let us know how it turns out! You can join the group at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/necchisewingmachineclub/
and the sister group where we have a manual and a service manual too. If you do join, just tell me in the comments that you're Caroline from the QB. I cringe every time I see a Lydia on ebay and try to clue the seller into this so they'll check it out. One last week did and changed his listing to it being a parts machine. She's so beautiful it's a shame she has this problem. There are so many other vintage Italian Necchis that are wonderful so don't give up if you'd like to have one. We like to say that now that you've planted the seed, one will find you very soon!