Originally Posted by
labtechkty
Don't know much about Long arm machines, so I ask what are zippers, are they like leaders that are attached to the roll bars and then attached to quilt top?
Not everyone who longarms uses zippers, but they are popular with places that rent their longarms, since a customer can attach them at home and that reduces the time needed to load the quilt at the longarm rental place. They're also used by some longarmers since they make it easy to take one partially finished quilt off the longarm, replace it with a higher priority quilt, and then re-load the original quilt.
When zippers are used, there's a short leader attached to the pole, and that leader has one side of the zipper at the other edge. The quilt back is sewn onto another short leader that has the other half of the zipper, so the two leaders can be zipped together.