Brother Sewing Machine Quilting
How do I raise the feed dog on my Brother sewing machine?
My sewing machine hasn’t been used in like 5 years (or more). I have decided to get back in to quilting, but when I pulled out the machine to clean and oil it I discovered that the feed dog is not raising high enough and therefore the fabric is not feeding through but just staying in place and creating a big mess. I don’t have a lever to raise or lower the feed dog (I looked on the machine and in the manual). Is there any way to raise the feed dog manually?
It is definitely the feed dog. It is not going above the plate. I have cleaned and oiled it. It’s just a simple machine so it would be less expensive to replace than to repair it. If we can’t figure it out, that’s what we are going to do.
Alright my superhero (husband) has come to the rescue again. He completely took the machine apart and figured out what made the feed dog work and I think that he has fixed it. I have often wondered why I married a mechanic, but today he has shown how useful he can be…again.
Unthread the machine, top and bottom. Put a piece of paper under the presser foot, select a medium straight stitch, drop the presser foot and step on the pedal, hands off the paper.
If the machine doesn’t transport the paper, try one more thing: take the needle out of the machine, drop the presser foot, and put your foot on the pedal and hold it down full speed for at least 5 minutes. Sewing machine oil can thicken up, and running it for a long period of time can loosen things up. If 15 minutes of this doesn’t do any good, you’re probably looking at professional repairs.
BUT— If the paper is transported and you see a line of holes from the needle, then the problem isn’t the feed dogs — it’s more likely to be an upper threading problem or you forgot to drop the presser foot when you started to sew (easy when it’s a thick piece of work like a quilt.)
The most likely cause, however, is that you tried to thread the upper part of the machine with the presser foot down. This closes the upper tension disks so the thread actually never gets in the upper tension. Rethread from scratch, this time with the presser foot raised. Try again (and don’t forget to hang onto the tails of the bobbin and top thread when you start a seam!)
This is such a common set of problems that I did a series of photos of what a machine does with minor misthreadings. The pictures are in pairs showing the top and bottom of the fabric. Upper thread is blue, red thread in the bobbin. The first pair is correctly threaded, and I suspect yours looks like the last couple of pairs: http://www.picturetrail.com/sfx/album/view/22521551
If you’ve been playing with the upper tension for some reason, set it to 4, which is normal for most fabrics, most stitches. If you have to go outside the range of 3 to 5 for a straight stitch, you’re probably looking at a machine in need of professional adjustment.
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