The Weather Outside Is Frightful…

Pearl… supervising.

We have been experiencing some rather extreme cold this week, but as we are on our Christmas break we’ve been staying inside and staying cozy and working on little personal projects like my Wheeler and Wilson D9 treadle I picked up in October.

As always, Pearl needs to supervise and provide moral support as at 2 ounces she is just not big enough to help remove frozen clutch knobs on 120 year old machines and will say I was successful in doing that, and also managed to find a set screw for it.

Very few machines made can sew as smoothly and beautifully as a Wheeler and Wilson D9.

Besides puttering around in the shop I have been busy in the kitchen… have been churning butter and making soup. Mulligatawny is a wonderful spicy chicken soup that is perfect for cold winter days.

The butter press came from my aunt who used to have a small dairy and made and sold butter in her community, it is probably as old as me.

Freshly Churned Butter
Mulligatawny Soup

2021 is almost over and in a few days we will be ringing in the new year, the weather is supposed to warm up to normal temperatures (which is still below freezing) and think we will be able to get out and sit around the fire with some tasty hot beverages.

We’ll be back in the shop January 3rd, there will be a good number of beautiful machines coming up for sale and I will be working on designing and making some new products in the workshop.

Wheeler and Wilson D9 treadle

Merry Christmas

Christmas will soon be upon us and we are hoping all our friends, family, and customers have a joyous holiday.

We will be away from December 24th until January 3rd on a much needed break as it has been pretty non stop here for months.

Looking forward to the new year, and wishing everyone health and happiness.

Tool Time – Working On The Lathe.

When you have a little shop that makes parts for sewing machines, accuracy is important, and as I have yet to install a DRO (digital read out) on my lathe I have no way to measure carriage travel save for measurements on the parts.

In not too much time I made this carriage stop with a mount for a dial indicator, test fitting it here before I drilled and tapped a few small holes for set screws.

All finished up with set screws to hold the indicator and a proper washer under the nut to keep the bolt from biting into the aluminium. This is for taking accurate depth measurements when I am facing parts, or needing accurate measurements on small parts.

The block also accepts a sliding rod I machined to use as a moveable stop, increments on the rod are marked at 1/10 of an inch to give me a simple reference.

My daughter, who has only taken a passing interest in the lathe saw this and said that it was really cool and asked “you made that ?”.

Will have to spend some time with her showing how it all works as the kid does have some mad skills and likes math, which is rather essential for making parts.

Back to your regularly scheduled sewing content… I did make a new tree skirt from some vintage fabric we thrifted the other day.