Originally Posted by
KenmoreGal2
Thanks Tami! I will do as you advised. I wasn't having skipped stitches during FMQ though, that was someone else.
Well, my memory does have a few holes.
I had an interesting problem machine on my bench today: It was a Singer 500J It came in because the needle thread was intermittently wrapping around the hook retaining finger under the feed dogs. Until this would happen, the stitch would be a tiny bit loose but fairly acceptable otherwise - except that the tensioner was turned up to 8 to get that "fairly acceptable" stitch.
This indicates thread that's not being well controlled. On a lark, I put the presser foot down and tugged on the needle thread. Practically no tension. Ahhh. There's the problem! Rebuilt the tensioner, made a couple of clearance adjustments in the hook area and it's sewing great now.
Incidentally, the reason I don't recommend "un-threading everything and re-threading" anymore is that we don't learn anything from that. If something's jumping out of a guide, or the thread isn't flossed into the tensioner right, we'd not see that and know to pay more attention to that particular area, we'd just keep getting frustrated and un-threading and re-threading". For me, a machine misbehaving is a learning opportunity.