Sewsation

My latest acquisition is a Kenmore 1802 (158.18021) with all the trimmings from the original owner. She reported she received it new as a gift in 1969 and never oiled it. She said it was professionally serviced thirty years ago. The feed dogs were frozen, but the basic machine worked. I did not test the machine with the cams because I was unsure of the required settings.

The guts of the machine were dry as a bone. Even the presser foot lever squeaked when moved. I cleaned, oiled and lubed everything I thought required doing so. Carefully using a hair dryer and Tri-Flow, I managed to free up the feed dogs. Hooray! The manual says to change the tension when switching back and forth from narrow to wide stitches. The tension dial rotates like crazy with very little change in tension. In spite of this quirk, I managed to make some halfway decent stitches.

So, on to the cams. I was excited about this because I have another Kenmore 158 series machine (158.18150) with cams, and it sews beautifully. I followed the instructions in the Kenmore 158.18021 owner’s manual and tried about three cams, only to have the machine sew a mess in reverse, tight stitches on top and loops underneath, nothing resembling the cam pattern. The machine will not sew forward when in cam mode. What could be wrong? What may be stuck? What have I missed?

I am a beginner at tinkering with sewing machines. I watch a lot of YouTube sewing machine videos.