As to the arm-mounted pin cushions (that cause the pin rash) are concerned, I nearly always remove them on machines that I get having them. One exception was my 1944 Singer 29K70 boot patcher. I’ve had it and have used it probably an average of once every couple of weeks since 2007, and never thought to remove the pin cushion for some reason. It’s home-made out of thin leather and what looks like a piece of an old wool saddle blanket. It’s sort of “saddle-maker-looking”, so maybe that’s why I’ve left it as-is. It’s laced onto the arm with leather lacing. It has always had pins sticking in it, but I seldom use pins while using it, and also had added a chicken-shaped pin cushion to the machine a couple of years ago that rides in the lattice of the Needle Bar Driving Lever across the top of the arm in case I’m ever pulling pins on a project. The chicken doesn’t have any pins in it yet.
Last week when I was sewing sports patches onto the sleeves of a school letter jacket, I snagged the back of my hand on a pin sticking down under the arm. I had to halt my sewing project to make sure that I didn’t get blood on anything, and got to feeling around on the saddle blanket part of the pin cushion, and found a whole bunch of sharp points sticking out, but no sign of the heads. The cushion had rotated down around the arm over time that placed part of the wool under the arm. Since I had time while waiting for the bleeding to stop, I carefully removed the cushion without damaging it.
When I opened the cushion up to look at the side that had been against the arm, it was just full of pins and needles that couldn’t be seen from the outside. I saw that I had been lucky that I went so long before gouging myself, and commenced to removing pins and needles. I didn’t count them, but I probably got 25-30 pins and needles out of there, including 3 machine needles.
Once I was sure that I’d gotten all of the sharp things out of the cushion, I laced it back onto the arm for a decoration and went back to work on the jacket.
CD in Oklahoma