Adieu Knitwords

I was saddened last week to learn that my favorite Machine Knitting Magazine, Knitwords, is ceasing publication.

This was a fabulous magazine for machine knitters. It contained fashionable sweaters for all ages and machine types featuring many techniques. It was a labor of love for the publisher, Mary Anne Oger. The love showed in every issue. I have them all, and refer to them every time I make a sweater on the machine.

The limited good news is that Mary Anne plans to be available for seminars. I hope she will continue to design and publish. She has so much talent and so many creative ideas for machine knitting.

Machine Knitters have so few resources left. For magazines, we have exactly two - Country Knitting of Maine News and Views and Machine Knitting Monthly from the UK.

I urge machine knitters everywhere to support the remaining publications. I would hate to loose them too. We need inspiration for the machine knitters today and those to come.

Shade Tree Knitting Machine Mechanics

A very common problem with Brother and Knitking knitting machines is as they age, the fairisle button becomes glued to the thread lace button by old oil and grease. My favorite machine has been suffering from this malady, and with no knitting machine service people in the area, I decided to take matters into my own hands.

I thought maybe someone else might benefit from this information, so I am breaking my blogging silence.

Now one thing that does work on this problem every time I am aware of is to remove the carriage from the machine and warm up the center bottom of the carriage with a hairdryer for about a minute, then retry the buttons. Repeat a couple of times if needed.

I have used the hairdryer, with success, on this particular carriage. The problem is that the gunk rehardened and the button restuck, so more drastic measures were called for. My Bulky machine had the very same problem, and I used the hairdryer on it. After nine months the buttons are still working properly, so the hairdryer is the first thing I would recommend.

If you want to try this, you are on your own, I just want to make that perfectly clear. I am not going to accept any responsibility for your results.

Things can definitely go wrong, and if you are not 100 percent confident, then you best leave this for the experts. We still have a handful of folks in the Machine Knitting Repair business, and I suggest you send your carriage to them if you are not mechanically minded.


I have NO Knitting Machine Mechanics training. I have been thinking about doing this for literally months and have studied everything I could find on the subject, including the 930 Service Manual and the one website I found with photos of something very similar on a different machine.




So, if you are still with me, here is how I unstuck my fairisle button:


I used a flat head and Phillips screw driver, a container to hold the screws and parts, a container for some mineral spirits also known as paint thinner, a bristle brush, some news paper, some paper towels, Q-tips and Formula 409 cleaner.

1. I removed the carriage and the presser plate. Then I unscrewed the handle. My machine has a motor drive, so the handle is attached by a bracket. For most machines the handle is held on by long screws.




2. I turned the tension dial to past zero to help line everything up later. I made sure the Hold button was all the way at the left. The release button should be at the left naturally.




3. Carefully, with the flat blade screwdriver I pried up around the center white disk. This disk is held on with delicate plastic feet, and I was very careful with it. If a foot breaks, it will not stay in place and I would be guessing about my tension. I also know a lot of this old plastic is very fragile.
   



4. Next I removed the screw in the center of the tension dial and lift the dial and the small center disc straight off.




5. I turned the carriage over and removed the two screws that connect the cover to the business part of the carriage. On every carriage I have examined these screws are gold colored, but that may not be true always. There are lots of screws here and removing the wrong one would mean a trip to the repair person, so I was extremely careful.



6. Next I poured a little mineral spirits into a small container (I was in a well ventilated area), and applied it to the center area and edges of the carriage. I worked with all the buttons. I let it sit for a few minutes, then wiped off the excess and repeated. I kept working with it, and soon the farisle button button was unstuck! Then using the Q-Tips, I carefully wiped off the gunky areas of the carriage. I did not want to knock anything loose!
   


7. So, all that remained was to reassemble the carriage cover and knobs and switches. There are a couple of tricky bits here. First thing I did was to wipe off the interior of the cover with the Formula 409 and a paper towel, just to get all the sticky residue that I could
   
   
8. Next, the hold button and the release lever go back into place on top of the carriage. Then place the cover over the carriage insides and reattach with the golden screws.
   I checked all the levers and buttons to see if they were working, and found out the intarsia feature would not engage, so I had to take the golden screws back out and try again. The next time everything worked. I have a photo here so you can see the placement of the levers.



9. Next I replaced the tension disc. Since I turned the dial as far as it would go before I started, I knew the position was correct.



10. The small disc that goes under the screw was a little tricky to get back on. The "bump" goes up, and The notch goes at the bottom. The notch will line up with the red line on the center plastic disk when it is snapped carefully back on. I was careful to line up the notch first then gently snap in the disk. I was still worried about those fragile feet!
    
    
11. All that remained was to reattach the handle and I was done with this repair!

I hope that my experience helps someone else. It was not too hard to do, and since we Brother/Knitking People are now on our own, we have to help one another when the repairs are fairly simple.

Mother of Invention

They say that necessity is the mother of invention. Well, I think that is true.

I have a love hate relationship with the Design A Knit software program also known as DAK.

Love:

• Original Shaping


• Stitch Designer


• Knit from Screen

Hate:

• the Copy protection that makes it difficult to move it between my computers and makes it impossible to install on a computer with no CD or diskette drive


• the "life" system that makes me dependent on ONE person in the US in case of a life lost


• the expense of the cables. I have many knitting machines and the cable expense for all of them runs into more than a thousand dollars


• the fact that the software does not keep up with the times and has not had a new release in a very long time and every upgrade costs more and more money

I have become dependant on Original Shaping and the Knit from Screen function. I use these for almost everything I machine knit, and I would not be adverse to using it for my handknits. I have a computer that is pretty much dedicated to DAK. It really runs nothing else, so I don't have to worry about losing my DAK "life" from some innocent file cleanup.

Last summer I used DAK to design a little bolero top that I planned to knit on my LK150. It was based on a design from my favorite machine knitting magazine Knitwords. Of course, I planned to use a different yarn, and so a different stitch gauge and also a different machine with no automatic patterning meaning every single row has some sort of manual intervention.

I thought I would just knit the bolero from the Garment Notation print out of DAK. The top was to be knitted sideways with curved front edges so there was a lot of shaping involved. What makes this little bolero is the lacy stitch design. On the LK150, settings have to be changed manually on most rows to make the design.

Normally, I would color code the settings and changes as a stitch design, merge that with the garment design and knit from screen so with every row I could see what to do with each needle on each row. However, I do not have a DAK cable for the LK150 (which has no electronics or anything fancy). I also do not have my DAK enabled computer nearby so that I can see the screen and advance the knit from screen manually. (Advancing manually sounds hard but really is not that time consuming especially since the end result is what you designed.)

I gave this three attempts before giving up. I tried knitting it from the Garment Notation print out, but with pattern manipulations going on every row and shaping on many of them, I got too confused. I tried charting it in a spread sheet with the same result.

Fast forward to Christmas: My husband received a netbook computer - a small laptop with a small screen that does everything wirelessly. It has no CD or DVD drive and of course no diskette drive. It weighs just over two pounds and is ideal for traveling. And, it fits perfectly on the back of the table my LK150 is attached to. However, there is no way to install DAK on it without buying an external CD drive. These are expensive.

So, this got my wheels turning. How could I use the netbook to display the DAK screen from my DAK computer, preferably for free?
Windows Messenger to the rescue! Windows Messenger has many cool features. One of them is Application Sharing with Remote Control. Best of all it is FREE!

I set up an additional Windows Messenger account so I could message between the computers. Next, I shared my DAK session to the netbook and am able to advance the rows remotely with Knit from Screen. I tested this with a sweater which is the first I have ever knit for me on the LK150, and it worked fabulously. Next, I did an Intarsia Design on the LK150 and that also worked really well.

This setup is allowing me to knit things that I would not have tried before on my little simple machine. Maybe I will try that bolero again ....