got my Gammill in April, had knee surgery about 3 weeks ago (until then basically could not stand for long, but did get a practice "picnic quilt" played with). Thought I was all ready to roll after the plain practice quilt where I did "everything" only to find that the tension was wacky on it. Of course did not figure that out until I'd already put a practice/charity quilt on the frame and had even worse tension! Spent 2 days looking at all the directions, DVD's, and YouTube on tension I could lay hands on and finally noticed that, duh!, I had the darn thing loaded wrong (the backing and batting were about 4in away from the top!). So unpinned, unsewed, and started over. Not bad--still have lots of problems with my start/stop knots! Then loaded another practice/charity quilt 2 days ago and same problems even after all the adjustments on the last quilt! Took 45 min to figure out that the thread was not "flossed" in the intermediate tension--once I figured that out, it's been fine. Just seems like a lot to remember to do--when I got my new domestic machine 3 years ago I no longer had to check/adjust stuff like with my old machine and now I'm back to that routine with my longarm! But sure love to quilt on it instead of domestic machine, so it's sure worth it. Think I need to develop a check list like airplane pilots do though!
Any tips for the start/stop issues? just looks sloppy and otherwise it's not secure.