Originally Posted by
manicmike
Well, you
are a girl, aren't you?
I absolutely must use a system or I'll forget something, but my new 320k I just attacked with nothing other than the experience of the 319(k also). First thing was to remove the needle and make sure it's a 206x13 (it was). There's just no substitute for experience, and this machine is now as close to perfect as anything I have: it's way smoother than my lovely 319k because I knew exactly what to do. The mechanicals, the motor, the foot controller, all from experience and lots of reading. This one was slightly different in that I used WD40 to dissolve the old dirt and not sewing machine oil. It was very efficient, but I doubt I'd do that on an older, Japanned machine. WD40 is (apparently) 51% Stoddart solvent and goes through the brown caked on crap very quickly (checked the decals carefully and seem unaffected)
We're so lucky there are so many quality and other machines around so we can all learn without too much risk or expense. The beauties in our collections must "run out" at some stage and we'll be the repositories of experience.
Just a few morning thoughts
One more machine to go over this weekend (the 401g).
The 401G will be a great machine - the hardest part is the stitch selectors - I've freed up so many 401, 500 and 600 stitch selectors I can't keep track - they all seem to collect a lot of dried up oil. I've seen some that needed one solvent and some that worked better with another solvent. I figure solvent is solvent... what ever... The only luck I've had is to use the Tri-flow
after it's been cleaned up - otherwise the machine needs to be used A LOT or it will re-glue itself with the dried up oil. On those machines I tend to start with those parts since they tend to be the hardest parts to clean up.