Sailing Canoe Chapter 7: Sew a Skin over the Hull Skeleton and Seal it.

Step 11 Another Sewing Machine Dies

The machine jammed. I couldn't get it to sew. It just kept jamming. I kept having to pull the plate and the bobbin and digging snarls out.

I wasted a lot of time trying to fix it. When it was over I sent this email to Star

The new sewing machine died this am despite the metal gears.
It died in a complex marketing-driven-feature-bloat way.
It has so many features they mechanically divided by zero while sewing and
it ate itself.
I dissected its tiny left-hand-threaded unnecessaries while cursing the
Singer Nibelungs who'd cobbled on so many weird features.
I got the last interlocking piece off and on its underside was the wad of
thread that had played fulcrum to the lethal mantissa.
Before me lay a heap of tiny parts not found in any hardware store.
I put them back onto the machine, and oddly there were none left over. Even
more amazing, the machine sewed just fine after that.
So I finished sewing the skin.

Comments

[HappyHeadCase]

I love your description of battling with sewing machine "engineering". I've had to teach myself basic mechanics on the fly while trouble-shooting the problems with my own (NEW) Singer machine, and have come to the conclusion that I could probably design and build a better machine with no prior knowledge. As you say, the extra features divide by zero. In the end, all we really want is a machine that can straight-stitch and zig-zag. I'm really enjoying this build, as well as your commentary.