Originally Posted by
Champanier
I disassembled the entire bobbin case and it actually was pretty clean, but I cleaned every last bit and oiled and reassembled. The bobbin tension could probably be a little looser, but it's hard to tell for sure since I can't get it to sew. I have the needle in with the flat side to the left and threaded right to left. The problem with stiffness in the wheel occurs even with the machine completely unthreaded.
You can still tell without sewing: Just pull it (through the needle plate) toward the left of the machine with your fingers. It should have only enough resistance to be noticed, not to turn your fingernails white.
The stiffness in the wheel seems to be linked to the feed dog movement then. Set it to zero and see if it moved freely. Does dropping the feed dog help or make no difference? Look at the feed dog mechanism under the machine where the drop knob resides while turning the hand wheel.
The stiffness is obviously your major problem and when you fix this chances are the other problems will simply go away. I'd guess that an object is possibly stuck in the FD mechanism.