tmg

I don't have a Bernina but I have a Janome MC6500. I sew right foot with right knee.

Polliwog

Bought a Bernina 150 in 2001 and have always used my left foot for the foot pedal and the right knee with the knee lift. Also have a Viking Sapphire 850 with punch buttons for the lifting, starting, and stopping. When you pause in your stitching, the foot pedal goes up slightly, allowing easy repositioning of the fabric. Wonderful feature!

Dolphyngyrl

me too except I do it on my babylock

zkosh

I have the Bernina vintage 830 and I was taught to use my left foot on the pedal and right knee. I am using a Pfaff 2140 now and still use the left foot for the pedal, but the darn knee lift lever keeps falling out of the hole that it goes in. Has anyone else had this problem?

DebsShelties

While I do not have a Bernina, I do have a knee lift on one of my machines, it is removable. I choose to not use it as I tend to bump into it and raise the presser foot.

mpspeedy

I know of a cure for the knee bar falling out. I tend to sew very fast and that makes the machine vibrate and the knee bar fall out. I complained to the dealer and he took the knee bar and made some adjustments. What he did was basically bang the end of the metal against a hard object enough to flatten it a little. He then stuck the kneebar back in the machine. If it still didn't fit tight enough he repeated the process. As the wife of a machinist I have had experience with that kind of fixes by my husband. It works. Metal is surprisingly maluable.

quilterknitter

When I had knee replacement surgery in my right knee last year, I started to use my left foot on the pedal and found it to make more sense when using the knee lift. However, somehow I reverted back to using my right foot. This July I attended 3 quilting retreats, which were some distance from my home. Two were 4 days and 1 way 6 days. Between the driving and all that quilting, would you believe that I got plantar faciatis in my right heal!!!! It hurts sooooo bad that now I'm back to using my left foot on the pedal. You just can't keep a quilter down!

DesiG

I have a Bernina 430 and use left foot for the gas, right knee for the lift. I actually had to change my Singer 301 back to a foot pedal, (its in a cabinet where you were supposed to use your knee for the gas) since I kept trying to lift the foot and ran the machine instead :-)

euclid

Did you check on the bottom of the foot pedal to see if there was any more length of cord wound around the spool?

ajohn52

Absolutely!!! That's the way my Bernina dealer taught me. And the foot peddles on the new machines wind up at the bottom, so you need to unwind it to make it longer to place for the left foot.