Sarabela

I received some replacement bulbs for my 328k and I couldn't get them to twist and lock. I asked my husband to help me screw in a lightbulb and he thought I was making a joke about the old "How many people does it take to screw in a lightbulb? " He gave it a whirl and couldn't do it either. I emailed the Sew-Classic people inquiring about the issue and meanwhile i dug the old bulb out of the trash to compare. The button thing on the bulb that locks it into place is different. The new bulb has wider buttons. My husband took a file to one of the new ones and made the buttons more narrow and now it screws in. I thought I would share in case someone else had the same problem.

ETA: In the picture the new bulb is on the left.

manicmike

Looks like a normal modern manufacture quality problem (as in the lack of it).

ThayerRags

It could be planned. It’s very similar to how our beloved Singer was back in the day....

Today they’ll sell you the bulb, but it will only fit into their socket, attached to their machine. It’s that way with most of the new sewing machine parts today.

Sounds kind of like Singer’s screw threads and needles from days gone by, doesn’t it? Who says history doesn’t repeat itself?

CD in Oklahoma

Sarabela

A woman that I work with was telling me the other day that the new Keurig machines will only take the Keurig brand pods. Such a scam.

J Miller

Hmmm, so far I've not run into that. Forewarned is forearmed .... or so they say.


Joe

manicmike

Pretty sure it's not that: I have a lot of these Singer bayonet bulb machines and any brand of bulb will fit. My local parts supplier only sells two brands. The more expensive is made in Germany, the cheap one is from China. Sounds like she may have found something even cheaper (quality-wise).

Sarabela

I got them from Sew-Classic. The first one I put in was burned out an hour after I put it in the machine! The second one has held up so far.

J Miller

A lot of products that we take or took for granted are now made in China or other Asian countries. Besides their varying quality control, from great to dismal, they also use a different measuring system than we do / did.
In other words when we designed something made to Inch standards they use metric. A lot of times rather than fractionize their metric measurements to make the part exact, they just round it up or down to the next increment.
So their parts are not always the same measurements as the original.

Usually they are close enough to fit and work, sometimes not.

Joe

ThayerRags

There’s got to be something that explains why a bunch of engineers can’t make parts the right size when they usually have an original part to look at and measure, no matter whether they’re in China or any other country. It’s not like they have to create the part, but simply duplicate the part. The design work is already done for them. I just can’t see why they miss it so often.

CD in Oklahoma

J Miller

It's a mind set. Here is a documented example. But I no longer have the link. In WW II a B-29 made an emergency landing in Russia when it ran low on fuel during a bombing run to Japan.

The Russians eventually gave the B-29 back, but not before taking it apart and blueprinting it. They then made their own versions of it. These aircraft looked exactly like the Boeings, but were actually slightly bigger. The reason, when they made their aircraft they took the American specs, converted them to metric and then rounded the fractional metric measurements up to the nearest full millimeter. Hense the increase in size.

I suspect that more of the foreign copy cats do this than we realize.

Joe