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?