Last Sunday, because use of the computer causing long stitches, I decided to use a pantograph to complete a quilt I need to get in the mail next week. Here’s an example of long stitches in the tan triangles.
Like the entire frame takes a left turn at center where the two halves come together. A laser level is the ONLY way to know and get it right because the tracks may be the EXACT same distance apart at each end of the frame, but in the middle of the frame there may be a tiny point where it twerks to the left or right 1/8” and then 3 feet later, it’s a full 1/2” off, but it’s still parallel to the track across from it. If you only measure the parallel-ness (not a word but you know what I mean) sporadically on the frame like left/right/center, you don’t get the true picture. In a nutshell, it was the tracks not being perfectly parallel, but finding that out was not as easy as it seems. Then this week I FINALLY came across a way to definitively identify the root cause of the problem. Everything is level – everything is parallel. Needless to say, there has been a host of adjustments made to my frame and my carriage over the past 19 months.
I’ve fiddled with the alignment of the wheels on the carriage to make them fit the tracks in the troubled spots – but then they didn’t fit on the other parts. First I fiddled around with the encoders, then I messed with leveling the frame again, then I worked with realigning the tracks to make them parallel by taking the frame completely apart (twice) and putting it back together. Now this sounds like I figured it out that day. Like completely free-spinning! And where the wheels weren’t touching the frame, is where the long stitches occurred. So I got to looking under the carriage and sure enough, there were spots on the frame where the wheels of the lower carriage didn’t touch at all. One day (a year ago?) in my local quilt shop, I was lamenting about my problem and one of the employees said, “It sounds like your carriage doesn’t understand what your computer is telling it to do.” Hmmm. $15k worth of quilting equipment that hadn’t worked right since I got it. I have the King Quilter 18” (a Tin Lizzie), a Quilt Butler computer, and a Grace GQ frame.
I could kind of solve it somewhat, but never completely. There have literally been crying tears, screams, stomping, and tantrums as I could NEVER solve the problem.
This issue has been plaguing me since I bought my longarm back in Nov 16. For those who have been following my blog for any length of time, you know I’ve been griping about having long, dragging stitches in my quilts.
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