industrial sewing machines for sail cloth...

[rtriveter]

I am starting to look for industrial grade sewing machines to begin a project for an old lightning. Has anyone been through this process? I am looking for a used machine and wondered if anyone had any tips/ favorites/ must haves/ deals or good places to look. Any info would be greatly appreciated as thus far all of my info is off the internet. Maybe I should find a good rigging book!

Thanks

[ishmael]

Have you done a Google? My ex and I bought a refurbished industrial machine for less than two hundred dollars back in '81. I'm sure they are more now, but this one was set up properly for sail work and had been completely gone through. I don't know why it was so cheap, even by the day's standards. I want to say it was a company in Maine that refurbished them. It was a long time ago.

Good luck!

[R.I.Singer30]

There are ads in WB from Quality Sew www.qualitysew.com (http://www.qualitysew.com) starting at $398 for a zig zag.I'm lookin for a new career and have considered this myself.I took some upholstery classes years ago.I have an old Singer that I can do straight stitch through leather but no Zig Zig feature.

[Concordia..41]

We have custody of a Reed's Sailmaker that some friends bought used for around $200. As they say, it's the cat's meow :cool:

Our friends are liveaboards with a shortage of space, and well, Dave borrowed it so much it now lives with us.

I've only done canvas work with it - amateur hour at its finest - but Dave's done sail work, canvas work, even put eisenglass inserts in the tarps that make the sides of our canopy work area.

Someone will chime in with the website, but there's a real useful forum just on this subject. I think it's run by the Sailrite folks.

[Todd Bradshaw]

There may be others that I don't know about, but Sailrites is:
http://forum.sailrite.com/

There are plenty of good machines, so I wouldn't get too hung-up on brands - BUT - any machine is only as good as the parts and service departments that back it up. The best available source of information on machines for sail and marine cover work is no doubt Sailrite. To start with, they are actually sailmakers, which can't be said for most of the other vendors. They know what you are trying to do and have usually done it before themselves. You also need a source that can literally diagnose a problem and tell you how to fix the machine over the phone because they're too heavy to ship back and forth all the time for adjustment or repair.

A bargain machine that you can't or don't know how to fix yourself, or one that requires you to hunt the internet for a week when you need a repair part may not be such a great bargain after all. You also probably don't really want a high-speed production machine for general-purpose work. Many of them have little or no slow-speed capability and can be too fast to really be in control of the darned thing in situations where you need precise stitching. With the pedal to the metal, my medium-speed machine will put in 25.5 stitches per second. You wanna know how often I run it that fast? Never.