manicmike

Well, you are a girl, aren't you?
I absolutely must use a system or I'll forget something, but my new 320k I just attacked with nothing other than the experience of the 319(k also). First thing was to remove the needle and make sure it's a 206x13 (it was). There's just no substitute for experience, and this machine is now as close to perfect as anything I have: it's way smoother than my lovely 319k because I knew exactly what to do. The mechanicals, the motor, the foot controller, all from experience and lots of reading. This one was slightly different in that I used WD40 to dissolve the old dirt and not sewing machine oil. It was very efficient, but I doubt I'd do that on an older, Japanned machine. WD40 is (apparently) 51% Stoddart solvent and goes through the brown caked on crap very quickly (checked the decals carefully and seem unaffected)
We're so lucky there are so many quality and other machines around so we can all learn without too much risk or expense. The beauties in our collections must "run out" at some stage and we'll be the repositories of experience.
Just a few morning thoughts One more machine to go over this weekend (the 401g).

miriam

The 401G will be a great machine - the hardest part is the stitch selectors - I've freed up so many 401, 500 and 600 stitch selectors I can't keep track - they all seem to collect a lot of dried up oil. I've seen some that needed one solvent and some that worked better with another solvent. I figure solvent is solvent... what ever... The only luck I've had is to use the Tri-flow after it's been cleaned up - otherwise the machine needs to be used A LOT or it will re-glue itself with the dried up oil. On those machines I tend to start with those parts since they tend to be the hardest parts to clean up.

Sideways

It is, thank you so very much.

If I lived closer and not in Pennsylvania, I would love to come!!

manicmike

Thanks again Miriam. I'll let you know about the level of gum and what I use (but I suspect I'll go with WD40 again).

miriam

I never use that stuff - I don't have any around

manicmike

Have you had a bad experience with it?

SteveH

I use WD-40 All the time. I buy it in 1 gallon cans and I have two onsite now. I use it with a "green scrubbie" for removing rust off of armor. It is great for cleaning metal of ingrained crud and water and old oil.

WD-40 (Water Displacing Formula #40) is a surface tension breaking penetrating fluid. (NOT an oil)
Oil is a high surface tension lubricant (clings to metal to keep it cool and slick under friction)

If you want to see the effects of surface tension breaking, fill a glass carefully as full as you can make it, so the water is even slightly above lip of the glass in the middle and surface tension is holding it in place. Then add 1 Drop of liquid dish soap (or WD-40) and the surface tension of the water above the lip is released and it runs down the sides of the glass. Until you remove ALL of the soap or WD-40 you cannot make the water bulge above the lip again.

So, when you do that to a crevice with crud in it, you may get the crud out but you also leave a coating of surface tension breaking chemical.

Now, when you add Oil or Tri-Flow, it has to fight with the WD-40 to do ITS job.

WD_40 is great, but you need to remove it when you are done, so I do not bother. I use Oil to begin with and Tri-Flow to finish.

Vridar

Another way to demonstrate surface tension. Dish soap will do the same but makes bubbles. More recent surfactants don't suds. They don't need to. Lather up a dish pan or such and drop a little cationic surfactant such as hair conditioner or Cepacol in it and the bubbles disappear. I did not know WD 40 was essentially an oil based surfactant.

manicmike

Well I cleaned her up tonight and there was none of that. There was of course a load of crap under the feed dogs but other than that it looked like it had just been serviced! Wiring was slightly dodgy but when I plugged her in and pushed the foot pedal the motor went so fast I half expected the machine to take off!
Here she is prior to the clean and lube:
[ATTACH=CONFIG]437612[/ATTACH]
EDIT: The oil drip tray was saturated and smelly. Will fix up with kerosene tomorrow.