I swear this is the last mechanical post.

My machine is done - clean, assembled and functional, but not with out some measure of hardship.



I finished cleaning all the needles and then started putting the needles back into their channels. As I was putting them back in the needles pushed out more little balls of fluff, which I duly cleaned up. After I'd done most of the back (main) bed, I got to a spot where the needles wouldn't go though and *gasp* at one point pushed up a piece of the spring! I stopped immediately as I live in terror of breaking it.

I had a look to see what the trouble was. As you can see in the picture below, you can see though the channels to the other side. The two channels near the 60 are clear. that's because I picked all the fulff out. They were JAMMED with fluff. You couldn't see through at all when I started.

Good picture, eh? You can even see the spring!

That's what the spring is supposed to look like. However, in another twist, once I cleared all the fluff out (about 8 solid hours, picking with a 0.85mm crochet hook - can you say obsession?) and started putting the needles back in AGAIN, I realized the problem was with the spring. In one place it's sort of kinked, and doesn't push the needles down like it's supposed to. What this means (I realized once I had it together and clamped down) is that the needles don't stay in working position but fall back to out of work. Feh.

So I removed the needles from the offending area, and used them to fill in the channels to the right. Fortunately it was pretty far off to the left side so a large usable space still remained. One day I shall figure out how to remove the lower rail and clean it completely and get a new spring. But for now, it seems to work great!
Cast on in fingering weight, 1x1 ribbing, tension in steps from 5 to 12, and back to 5.

Socks, maybe?

Attention

Some things require a lot...

and some things do just fine on their own.

Happy I'm-almost-on-vacation day.

My new baby

I recently bought this knitting machine from a woman in King City knowing absolutely nothing about it except that it looked cool, it was old, and it was a knitting machine. It had lots of bits and pieces so I figured, how wrong could I go? It was $50 - a bargain, I thought.



Turns out although labeled as a Singer it's a French-made model 360-2 Superba 5 mm fixed double bed machine - 1950's or 60's best that I can tell. No adjusting, all double all the time, although you can knit flat - even U-shaped if you need the full 360 needles wide. The indomitable Patrick swears they are the cats pajamas and he seems to be the all-time expert on them, hosting the Superba Knitting blog dedicated to them. Unfortunately Patrick is unable to walk me through the resuscitation of this machine (damn cancer) so I have to fumble though by myself.


Forgive the terrible picture, but maybe you can see that the needle in the upper position leans towards the peg on it's right. This = bad. It doesn't run smoothly in its channel and thus the carriage won't run smoothly either. Also,most of the needles were really sticky. Many of the latches wouldn't open or close without substantial help and that's just no good.

I bit the bullet and removed the needle retaining bar (yeah, I had to order a copy of the manual from someone and it came and it's in colour and it's beautiful and more to the point it's MY model. She's the only one I found who had the same one.). Then, starting with the fucked-up needles, I removed them a-la Patrick, with pliers. I only had to cut the latch hook off one, but I did snap the butt off one trying to get it out. Some of those suckers were wedged in there!

The rest came out by hand. Interestingly, the needles on the back bed were the mangled ones, and overall much harder to get out than the front bed. Maybe because it's used more? Who knows. Anyway, when the needles came out of their channels they brought with them little balls of felted fluff. Black felted fluff. Almost cute, but yet not.



Into the bath of methyl hydrate. (It was all I could find at Home Hardware. I guess I could go get IPA from the drug store but I can't be arsed.) The little bits of black crap on my table cloth is from the butts of the needles, which were by far the filthiest.


Out of the bath and polished lovingly by hand with a lightly oiled rag to remove the residual gunk and hopefully smooth out the corrosion a bit. Some are worse than others. I'm separating out the worse of them and we'll see how many we have to work with when I'm done. I find it strangely Zen polishing 8 million little latch hooks. They look so lovely and work so well when you're done.



Maybe that's why I like machine knitting so much. I get the creative stuff but I also get to indulge my mechanical side. It's a lot like owning a VW van again, but without the subzero rapped knuckles and the gasoline in your hair.

25 or so down, 300+ to go. Let's see how long it takes for the novelty to wear off. Or the skin on my thumb and forefinger - I'm betting that wears out first.