Originally Posted by
OurWorkbench
Welcome Stefan.
I can't help with needle issue, but hopefully I can clear up the serial number and approximate manufacture date. The ISMACS New Home serial numbers are only for the machines manufactured in Orange Massachusetts prior to 1930. They later moved to Rockford Illinois. Your machine would have been in the early 1950s. If you look at the last page of
https://www.janome.com/siteassets/su...anufacture.pdf you will find that the LLB and LLC were made 1951-1953;
Some pictures of similar machines can be seen at
Crinkle finish and other ugly finish machine thread Unfortunately CD is no longer active here. Many of us miss him. He is knowledgeable, helpful and has a neat sense of humor. It looks like the other person that had another green machine only posted that one day.
Janey - Neat people never make the exciting discoveries I do.
Hi Janey,
I looked at the linked images and the #78 post of the green wrinkle finish machine that is like my TYPE J with the same stitch length plate as jkniter shows. Thanks. I knew it was not from 1889 or so. SN: 883,952.
I missed that Rockford listing but my link only had Orange listed. Um? Oh well you nailed it. 1953 is very believable.
I am not sure what that LLB underneath on the cast chassis is or what 201-1 and the 2 on the next 'line' in the casting mean.
My 883952 does not line up with LLB and 1951-1952 ending with 883779 at the top of the page. LLC on the manual and the name plate nails mine as line two, 1952-1953. Maybe the LLB chassis frame were used for both LLBs and LLCs on the production line. There's a lot of starting 822624 variations in that listing. Bizarre.
I read the other links about the needle lengths. I didn't have a real one and so I did the next best thing with the better image of the NLB image hole shown on page 9.
Measuring all these different needles against my calibrated-laserjet NLB image showed up some differences I never noticed. First, the tops of the eye positions seem to be constant but some larger needle sizes have a longer hole opening and that is added onto the bottom of the hole eye towards the point or tip.
The needles I have seemed to all be longer at the top buy 1 mm, whether rounded or cone shaped on the end.
So, the critical distance of the top of the needle to the top of the eye is the distance that you have to set the needles at for a side-by-side to compare, IMO. Someone must have a for real CC1221 needle to compare in a photograph with the various sizes and any digital vernier numbers in mm or a ruler in the image.
It would be real nice to nail down in photos the exact differences for all to see AND save to memory.
The published chart on this thread were a mixed bag for 15X1 needles. So, I measured mine with my vernier to make sure of what I had. Unfortunately, it is had to estimate down to 0.1 mm where the vernier points are exactly lined up to that fine resolution, even with my head magnifier. I did the best I could with what I had.
I am surprised that nobody had done this comparison in this much detail before. I mean, these needles are hard to get and will be harder to get in the future. So, nailing this down now is important to me, at least.
I could be wrong but it seemed like the 15 means 1.5 inches plus a small amount more in inches. That's speculation.
HTH,
Stefan