I lately got an interest in long shuttle sewing machines after reading some articles on the vintagesewingmachinesblog . Some of such machines were for sale locally here in Denmark, and I got them very cheap. Among them is this Köhler sewing machine, that I attached a photo of. I did find one other photo of a the same kind of a machine sold some time ago on ebay. I have unsuccessfully tried to find information about it at Naehmaschinenverzeichnis.de and other places. Now I hope that somebody here know something about it. I can see, that Köhler sewing machine in general have been debated quite often Quiltingboard forums.
The machine also got the mark of Textima VEB and Altenburg. So it must have been produced after WWII in DDR. I do not know how it ended up in Denmark. Perhaps some friendly gift to a communist friend - who knows.
I have tried to sew a few things with it, and I am very impressed with its performance. In the heavy end it can sew Tex 210 polyester thread in 6 layers of vinyl with not much effort. But it is also able to sew with very low thread tensions in fine fabrics. I think it produces a very precise balanced stitch - better than the Singer 201.
Perhaps all the later long shuttle machines got this high standard, we just forgot it. But it is not a fast machine. The long shuttle machines is somewhat more complicated machines, and most likely more expensive to produce. The timing of the shuttle movement and the take-up lever will most likely cause this improved performance.
