Originally Posted by
JoeJr
As to gear sloppiness, I would not assume that the part you ordered matches what was the original. I've seen rubber like gears, and plastic/nylon looking gears. I don't know if it's too late, but I would consider replacing all the gears with a new set.
The gears have to line up such that there is not too much tension or pressure on the teeth. I can't remember exactly how the vertical shaft adjusts, but I remember trying to lift the gear slightly before tightening to line it up. As to the motor, I think there is a flexible part in the hand wheel, where the worm gear on the motor syncs in, and this creates some "delay" when starting up. This is important because when you are ready to reset the timing you want to cycle the machine in the proper direction to take up all this slack before tightening gears, meaning don't turn it backwards at all in order to line up the needle bar marks.
Hi Joe,
These are awesome tips, and I’ve actually had some more discoveries before totally putting this to use. Good new is, hard part is over and I think replacing gears will be easier in the future, but bad news is the new gears just may be too large.
To your point, I think replacing gears is a solid start and I’ve ordered some to replace the bottom hook gears. These seem to be working properly, but they may break in the future anyway. The problem I found lies with the connection of the top gear I replaced (image of location found in the link above) and how it attaches to the main drive shaft gear (the clear one in the photo set). It almost seems too tall, causing the gears to almost “chunk” into the next position rather than smoothly rotation. There is no room to move the clear gear backwards towards the manual knob/worm gear side due to the other gears being stuck in place. Really tricky to sort out that one.
But you are totally right about the work gear having some “sloppiness” due to the spring-like connection to the manual knob. That helped, but there was sloppiness due to me removing the whole gear set earlier on when I considered removing the main drive shaft… ended up finding the set screw for the metal piece next to the worm gear connection that removed some of the unintentional slop happening. Now it’s just the chunkiness and grinding of this new gear. Very confusing