blueheavenfla

I always do that before I put in a newly wound bobbin...EVERY TIME and it sure pays off!

HelenAnn

I had a quilt teacher years ago teach me to clean the feed dogs and bobbin area every time I wound a new bobbin. I keep Q-tips in my tools and still do the cleaning every time I change a bobbin. I also use a spider to stop and start my sewing so I don't get thread jams. That teacher from Blue Earth Minnesota was worth her weight in gold.
Helen Ann

KenmoreGal2

I've just discovered this thread. Funny!!!

I clean my bobbin area every time I change the bobbin. You could eat off it!

I'm super lucky. Check out how easy it is for me to remove the "thingy". I just open the door!

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ann31039

Actually did it today on my new to me 31-15. Easy access and it wasn't too bad. Just a light brushing. It was well taken care of. Now the Kenmore my sister found last month....... It had the felted feed dogs, felted everything. So glad I had bought that set of long tweezers in all shapes. Needed every one of them. You'd have thought I had cleaned a dryer lint trap. Good grief.

manicmike

Did someone mention bunnies?!? Industrial machines seem to have the most interesting bobbin dirt.

DonnaMiller

I giggled a lot. Just worked on a Touch and Sew, White and a few more. Really sick of lint and lazy people, who never cleaned these poor machines. They just keep making felt. My current pet peeve is people who never clean the dirt, lint and filth out of those poor foot controllers. The last one, Singer 15, I took apart, had, no kidding, an ounce of plain dirt from years of dirty shoes in it. No wonder it ran slow. Grit from dirt wears away the Nichrome wires in the old resistor-type foot controllers. The wire coils had the wires worn half through from sandpapering of the dirt through the years. Don't forget the pedals ladies. You will be so glad they are clean and safer.

zozee

Tammi, I'm looking at that photo of the machine all taken apart and I am absolutely astounded at your ability to make sense of all those moving (and stationary) parts. Wires and bolts and nuts and ...well, hat's off to you and anyone for whom that kind of work comes naturally.

ArchaicArcane

zozee! You should know that was during training on that machine and I had a service manual and an instructor to make sure I didn't do anything weird. It was my first dealing with those particular machines and it was unnerving because we took them apart on day one, then put them back together on day two. We were encouraged to take photos at every step so we'd have reference for putting it back together. (Sound familiar? It's what we always encourage here too. ) I had images of someone coming in during the night to clean and knocking it all over the place or something, or even just of me forgetting some things. In the end though, it was all fine.

I try really hard - even with vintage machines - to not leave machines apart longer than I need to because of the possibility of losing parts or me losing memory of certain pertinent details. Most days, I try to get a machine back together before I quit for the day just in case I don't get a chance to come back to it as soon as I hoped.

miriam

What Tammi just said. get'erdone...

I have a Singer 66 redeye on the dining room table with parts off. I am putting new shellac on it and I'm hoping no parts disappear before I get it done and with two or more dementia people plus little kids around who knows. I put the screws back in the holes for safe keeping. If not I put them on a magnet. I use a 8 X 11 sheet magnet to work over if I'm removing the bobbin case spring screws. I put them right back when I get that clean unless there is some dire emergency.... Anyway Mom likes to watch me do things. This particular machine was frozen up full of fuzz and fluff so I had to bring this thread back up. The decals are BEAUTIFUL - some of the best I've seen. I wonder though, if granny or who ever had cleaned up that machine if it would have had a lot more wear and a lot more history... I should have taken a picture but it wouldn't do it justice. That lint worked it's way into every little possible space - impacted. Funny but the red felt was missing. 1910 machine decapitated from it's treadle no doubt because it was 'broken' or frozen.... sigh. She is set free. I realize some of you clean your bobbin area regularly but from what I see most people just don't bother or they don't know how.

ArchaicArcane

The other thing that happens with leaving all that lint in there is that the lint acts as a wick and pulls oil and even grease away from where its intended to be. It actually accelerates wear to not clean your machine of lint.

Lint removal shouldn't always only be done by the service technician. I also think that failure to remove that lint - which leads to the premature wear - could be construed as abuse and may not be covered by warranty with newer machines when the technician sees the state of the machine. I typically warn people once about it, and if a machine comes in after that from the same person looking like it did the first time and there's wear, I won't go to bat for a warranty issue. Most - if not all - of the machine owner manuals I've seen say to remove lint buildup.

Besides, technicians - or maybe it's just me? - do get tired of being "cleaning people" and removing several years of lint and dried on coffee, etc from machines.