Thread Spools For Vintage Two-spool Machines
 

Happy Mother’s Day everyone. My wife spent part of hers sorting thread spools at the shop, which is probably not what most Moms do on their day, but she’s a real “trooper”. Anyway, to make a long story short, Coats and Clark changed their spools, thread color numbers, and their entire system back in 2008 when they came out with the Dual Duty XP. We were so well stocked up on DD+ thread spools that we opted to keep our vintage inventory and supplement it with the new spool types and numbers as we needed for some colors.

But now that the old inventory has sold down and we’ve replaced about 69 colors with the new XP spools, it was time to revamp the thread fixtures. We pulled a couple of hundred DD+ spools off of our fixture, and are saving them in boxes. We’ll now have to stock some additional XP colors to refill our fixture and provide the color shades needed.

I have a National Two-Spool machine head, but the canister is missing. I need help from someone that uses one and knows about the canister spools. Do the old Coats Dual Duty+ spools all fit the canisters? The shiny gold plastic ones (35 cents)? The white plastic ones (50-95 cents?). And do the new Coats 900 (smallest size now) spools fit into the vintage machines? Does it take the old small wooden spools to fit?

CD in Oklahoma

The two pictured won't fit. It takes a spool that is 1" diameter at widest, and is 1.25" tall. So far I've only found wooden ones in that size, and thankfully I've got a lot of them with all the vintage thread that I've gotten in cabinet drawers.

Thanks Macybaby, I was thinking that was the case, but don’t have a canister to test-fit for myself.

CD in Oklahoma

CD,

I also have a National Two Spool machine. I have found that there are some "emergency mending Kits" sold at Wal Mart -- the spools contained in those kits WILL fit the National Two-Spool canister. Too bad you are missing the canister -- I think I saw one on E-Bay a while back with a minimum starting bid of $350.00. Sure am glad mine has the canister!

Jeanette

CD,

I went back and looked at the small spools I found which fit in the Two-Spool canister. It's sold under the "Dritz" brand. I haven't been able to check them out to see if they work as well as a wooden spool, but they're the same size. Because they're plastic, there's going to be a difference in weight. That may or may not represent a problem!

I walked through Wal-Mart this afternoon and noticed they still had several sets of the "sewing" kit. The kit also comes with some hand sewing needles (some of the longest I've ever seen) and a threader. There are about 10-12 spools in the kit, so it's worth the $1.97 (I think that's the price).

Jeanette

Can you post a picture of a canister next to a ruler? Is fabricating one an unreasonable idea?