Hiccup

I was contentedly quilting along this morning, the time of day when I get the bulk of any quilting done, when suddenly my Brother/Nouvelle 1500 was useless. The needle wouldn't go all the way down and was blocked by a piece of metal!

I'd done nothing different from one minute to the next, except that one of the pin heads of the heavily pin-basted quilt sandwich

managed to hit the thread cutter button on the face of the machine as I was shoving the quilt through the 8" throat.

A pain in the neck, to be sure, because my quilting pattern for these star blocks is a single-line design with one start and one stop. I didn't need to have the thread cut midway through the design. Not only that, but the cut ends aren't long enough to knot and bury--they're barely long enough to grab hold of and cut flush to the fabric! For that reason (and the fact that I'm a Leader-Ender kind of sewist) I never ever use that thread cutter button.

But it got used nonetheless, and suddenly progress was at a standstill. First order of business: pop the plate and assess the situation.

Well, there's yer problem right there, purty lady! That there needle ain't lined up with that there little hole! (Yellow arrow)

It turned out I could maneuver the unit a little by placing my fingers in the aqua circled area and rolling it towards me. I could get the needle into the hole, but it took all my strength to keep the hole aligned until the needle completed its cycle. Once I let go, the unit snapped back a few millimeters and everything became unaligned again.

Hitting the thread cutter button shifted the unit a little, then lowered the needle automatically right down onto the metal surface. Even after removing the needle, I couldn't make heads nor tails of what was going on and why the timing seemed to have been thrown completely off.

A call to the local Brother repair shop garnered the bad news that they were 7 weeks out and taking names on their waiting list. I didn't have the luxury of putting the Twin Hugs on hold for 2 months! There was no way I could do all the stitch-in-the-ditch work I'd planned using my Viking long (mid?) arm. I'm shit at it on that machine, and it snaps thread like crazy when it goes really slow. I resigned myself to making the 4-hour round trip tomorrow morning to my bestie's house to borrow the twin to this machine that I gave her this summer.

But, for many years my mantra has been "Be more stubborn than the machine." It held me in good stead in the dozen years during which I repaired lab equipment. I paid one more visit to my Brother and, out of frustration, pushed that metal unit with its tiny hole as hard as I could away from me and the needle. It slid back and down, out of sight, and suddenly the bobbin case was clear and visible and the needle operated up and down, uninhibited!

My belief is that the piece that pulls the cutter mechanism back to home is broken. It either happened this morning, or long before I ever owned this machine. It's not something I'm going to worry about or pursue, because this isn't something I use, as stated. If that button gets hit again accidentally, I'll know what to do to make things go again.

I've no idea what that tiny hole is for.