Since I brought the B-Line frame and the Juki home some months ago, I’ve managed several projects on it. I enjoyed every single one of them, but there was one thing I couldn’t enjoy and neither did Ryan – the noise.
Note: This post can still apply to you if you don’t quilt on a frame. For instance, my Singer 301A is incredibly loud when doing FMQ as well.
Doing feathers and straight lines with the Juki made such a racket, that I couldn’t quilt at night once Ryan went to bed. It sounded like a jackhammer. Ryan’s even told me that he can hear the machine outside when I use it!
Yesterday, it was time to service the Juki again, and while I had it off the frame, I took the hopping foot off to clean the fuzz out of it, and I ended up running the machine without the foot. What a lovely sounding machine….
Wait,.. what? How could I love the sound off the frame, but hate it on the frame?
I realized I’ve been blaming the Juki when it was really the darning / FMQ foot at fault. Or I guess the interaction between the foot and the machine. The noise, the jack-hammering, comes from the needle clamp hitting the bar on the darning foot to push it up, so that the quilt sandwich can move and from the foot smacking back down when the needle clamp lets it fall.
Almost all FMQ feet have this problem. The noise from a machine on a frame just becomes harder to take because you can go so much faster on a frame than a regular domestic machine.
This is not my discovery, but it’s the first time that I’ve actually heard the difference. Leah Day has “broken” her FMQ feet for years, and she has a tutorial on how to do it, here. I’m not going to go through the process, because she’s an excellent teacher and shows you how do to it. There’s no point in duplicating the effort. 😉
The difference is staggering.
Of course, I modified the foot before it occurred to me that I would be writing a blog post about it, and there’s no video of it before. The other thing I found interesting is that the 1/4″ foot didn’t make nearly as much noise as the 1/5″ foot does.
I un-modified the foot, shot some video for you, and modified it on the video and put it on the machine.
http://youtu.be/lTOsegHSw1o
I think this is one modification well performing!
Today’s post brought to you by Heart – Beautiful broken from the album Fanatic