I bought the needle saver.. Punch the needle thru the pad aprox thirty times (without the thread if course!) and it sharpens it like new again.. Bought it from nancys notions for $9.99 ! Works great for me. I only change the needle when I break it..

Thank you for your response. I'm the 2nd owner of my 1222E, had to get the correct foot pedal for it, it was sewing all by itself at top speed...dd said it was possessed. lol poor girl scared her to death. My Pfaff shares my Horn quilter's cabinet with 4 other machines; just gotta switch out the plexiglass insert.

Purplefiend: I really like the older Pfaff's. My daughter has my other one that I traded her for her older one. Right now it happens to be at my house because I borrowed it last year when my 5 year old Pfaff broke down 4 times in 3 weeks! Just went down and looked at it and it is a 1222E also. I believe it is about a 1990 model. So we probably have the same machine. It is unfortunate the new Pfaffs are not as good as the older ones. I traded my 5 year Pfaff in for a Brothers OC1000. Works great. I also have a Janome (12 lbs) Great little machine. Also made by Brother. I now also have a 1946 Singer FW I won as the grand prize in a quilt shop hop. The one thing I miss on my Brothers is the upper feed dogs. What other machines do you have

bjdemir,
My other Pfaff is a 2040(about 10 yrs old), I mostly like it except
for if I barely touch the stitch changing wheel it changes the stitch for me; really hate that.
My dealer says my 1222E is from about 1980, it was well cared for and works very well now.
Sharon W.

I change mine also when one breaks, or I'm having problems with skipped stitches or thread breaking. Of course the needle company tell us to change them every 8 hours of sewing. They know we quilters will be changing them every other day. LOL

I was just guessing on my daughters 1222E as it was used when we bought it. Still one the great machines.

I'm the second owner. I bought it about 3 years ago, I wanted a machine with a bigger throat space for machine quilting.

By not changing your needle at least every 8-10 hrs of sewing or serging, you run the risk of shredding thread, burs, tears on your fabric, a very noisy machine and poor quality of your stitches, just to name a few things. Needles are the cheapest thing to use in sewing yet the most overlooked. You can fix a multitude of problems with sewing by simply changing the needle and using the proper one for the proper fabric. I have taught machine usage for 11 years and work for a dealer. For me, it isn't worth ruining a garment over something that cost less than a dollar.
Roma

First off to keep things in perspective . . . I work for the company that is the exclusive importer of SCHMETZ Household Needles into the North American Marketplace. Most of our sales are to distributors but we do also have a small retail web site. I get asked this question a lot by consumers. The SCHMETZ company line is to change your needle every 8 hours on average or whenever starting a new project. That being said, nothing beats the request I received a few years ago from a customer who was looking to purchase the exact SCHMETZ needle that was in her sewing machine. She was extremely proud that she had been using the same needle for 15 years and it finally broke. I didn't have the heart to ask her what her stitches looked like.