RAY WHITE CLASS

Today was the first day of the Advanced session of the Ray White Sewing Machine
Repair class. Betsy and her sister, Peg arrived.  Now I had two great and wonderful friends on my vacation with me.   I worked on an Elna Supermatic ALL DAY.  I should say that Ray helped me on the Elna all day.  But she stitches and now I am in love with this Elna.  The friction wheel  had a flat.  This is a common problem in Elna Supermatics  that have been sitting for a long time.  Now this should be a simple fix.  And we headed into it thinking this was easy.   It looked pretty straightforward once I got the handwheel off.  BUT, this was the FIRST time that Ray has ever had to move the motor down and out of the way to replace that friction wheel.  He did it and when he was pushing the roll pin out (not the one that holds the friction wheel, the other one), it came out in two pieces.  WRONG.  That told us that someone had been in that machine and just replaced that roll pin with the two pieces.  So I went to AutoZone today and bought a combo kit of various pieces because it looked like the roll pin included might fit and well, it was good enough.  So the machine stitches and one day I will tell you the whole story.  Tonight,  I am posting this one picture.

Ok well maybe two pictures:

Tom and I were working on the same machine.  A green Elna Supermatic.  His was a mess electrically, even popping the circuit breaker when he plugged it in.  Tom is an amazing electrician and he got that thing up and running.  But he had to take the bottom off to do so.  Well I had to take the bottom off of my machine too.  And we both made the SAME mistake.  We screwed the bottom back in UPSIDE DOWN.  Oh you should have been there.  I laughed and laughed so hard at my error, but then when Ray caught Tom doing the same thing well, I almost wet my pants.

Oh friends who love sewing machines, this is a blast.  We are all there working and playing and laughing and joking.  Poor Ray, I accused him of taking my light and bless his heart he just handed his over to me.  Then, at lunch, when I took off my apron, I found my light.  I had to eat crow then.  THEN, he had been missing his handy little HUSKY convertible screw driver.  Guess where it was? tucked away with my tools in my bin there (the one with the Frack button on it).  This is a great man and generous with his knowledge and his time.  He knows so much and is so practical about sewing machine repair.  I am truly a lucky woman today.