Well, here I am, then.

Heyo all,

Nelson here, just checking in to letcha know I finally got the link and jumped through the hoops and got signed on finally.

Not much to share at the moment, except that I'm still plugging away at the machine repair bidness, and doing reasonably well. July and August were very nice, September off to a bit of a slow start, but back-to-school time always led to a slowdown in the repair biz, as I recall. My ability to draw on a wide geographic area continues to be a real advantage, with consistently good business from the satellite drop-off locations at HollyHock Quilt Shop in Corydon and Wilderness Road in Danville. Onward through the fog!

For those of you who might be interested in this sort of thing, I recently encountered a most Dreadful Poss'm the likes of which I had not seen before: the Singer Athena 1060, circa 1977. Imagine the unholy mutant offspring of an Athena 1000 and a Touch-n-Cuss 750, combining all the worst aspects of two machines that were terrible enough individually. I can just imagine someone at Singer's office saying to one of his flunkies, "Hey, we've still got a boatload of these obsolete machine heads sitting in the warehouse--let's put some circuit boards and servos in 'em and see if anyone bites!"

A few unfortunate souls did, including one Little Old Lady from Harrodsburg. I dutifully replaced the broken gears and cracked bobbin winder cam, and was in the process of sewing it in (the tension looked really good, amazingly) when I foolishly decided to test the reverse feed. The machine sewed backwards for a few seconds, then stopped and sewed vigourously in place. A quick exam showed that every LED on the control panel had died, and the machine wouldn't respond to any input at all. Unless you're a real free-motion fiend, a machine that sews but won't feed doesn't do you any good atall. The solution would be a new control panel board, but the part is long since obsolete, and unavailable from any source. Demmit.

So I waited a couple of days before delivering the bad news, and my customer was disappointed, but took it in stride; after all, she had a broken machine before, and now she still had a broken machine, albeit one that had gone to its reward under my care. I didn't charge her for the diagnostics ("You don't have to pay for anything I smash" is one of my guiding business principles), and this week I'm going to try and fix her up with a nice used machine she can use for mending and such.

So it should be a happy ending.

And that's the news for now from the Mighty Metropolis of Glensboro-on-the-Salt. 'Til next time, I remain,

Thine,

N.