MrsWD's New, Mean, Mo-chine

[wdfifteen]

We’ve been making slow progress getting the machine up and running. It has 2 windows computers and a microprocessor on it and they all need to communicate. When we first turned on the computer with the internet connection it automatically updated itself and the others didn’t recognize it any more. We got that straightened out, and discovered it needed new canvas leaders. The PO had modified them and they needed to be brought back to stock configuration. Then we didn’t have enough red snappers – just one thing after another.
The PO has not been able to help because she is in hospice and doesn’t speak any more. Her husband made the sale to us and he doesn’t know anything about it, so we are flying on our own here. The good news is every time we tinker with it we discover another option that was added to it. We got a fantastic bargain on this. When we add up all the options we know about it comes to $44,000.
We have done a bit of practicing and need to do more, but MrsWD really needs to get this one quilt out. The basic functions of the machine are good enough for that, so we’ve suspended experimenting and gone straight to production for this one quilt.
I'm planning to make a video once we get back to experimenting.

[red-beard]

Originally Posted by cstreit

new thing I learned today.

Yeah! Kevin is a DICK!

If the robots rise against us, it is Kevin's fault!

Originally Posted by DonDavis

[craigster59]

Originally Posted by wdfifteen

We’ve been making slow progress getting the machine up and running. It has 2 windows computers and a microprocessor on it and they all need to communicate. When we first turned on the computer with the internet connection it automatically updated itself and the others didn’t recognize it any more. We got that straightened out, and discovered it needed new canvas leaders. The PO had modified them and they needed to be brought back to stock configuration. Then we didn’t have enough red snappers – just one thing after another.
The PO has not been able to help because she is in hospice and doesn’t speak any more. Her husband made the sale to us and he doesn’t know anything about it, so we are flying on our own here. The good news is every time we tinker with it we discover another option that was added to it. We got a fantastic bargain on this. When we add up all the options we know about it comes to $44,000.
We have done a bit of practicing and need to do more, but MrsWD really needs to get this one quilt out. The basic functions of the machine are good enough for that, so we’ve suspended experimenting and gone straight to production for this one quilt.
I'm planning to make a video once we get back to experimenting.

So is it one of those deals where you program it, pop open a beer and sit back and watch it do it's magic or do you have to constantly futz around with it?

Very nice quilt BTW.

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by craigster59

So is it one of those deals where you program it, pop open a beer and sit back and watch it do it's magic or do you have to constantly futz around with it?

Very nice quilt BTW.

You just turn it loose. We were in the showroom looking at them and they had one of them just quilting away with no one tending it. It was a bit smaller, like 18 inches I think. This one will quilt a space 26 inches deep by 12 feet wide without any attention. When it's finished you have to advance the quilt another 26 inches and turn it loose again.

[Scott Douglas]

Yeah, you'll run it unattended until the first time a thread breaks and the machine keeps running and you have to find out where it broke.
Not a fun scenario.
Looking forward to the video of it running.

[Bill Douglas]

Wouldn't Mrs. Wd get thrown out of the embroidery club for using a machine?

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by Scott Douglas

Yeah, you'll run it unattended until the first time a thread breaks and the machine keeps running and you have to find out where it broke.
Not a fun scenario.

No problem, it has a thread break detector. You can see a yellow wire to the left of the sewing head. It goes to the thread break detector. It will shut down the machine and sound off like a fire alarm if the thread loses tension. Ask me how I know. My dog needed a Valium.

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by Bill Douglas

Wouldn't Mrs. Wd get thrown out of the embroidery club for using a machine?

She doesn’t have any interest in using the embroidery module. It would cost a few bucks to unlock it anyway (like paying Tesla to unlock ludicrous mode in a model S).

[DonDavis]

How about an update?

How's the performance?

Got a video?

[wdfifteen]

We've been making quilts with our Innova long arm quilting machine since we bought it 2 years ago. The thread break sensor (TBS) hasn’t ever worked. In between stitching quilts without the TBS (pain in the ass), I’ve tinkered off and on trying to get it working, but last week I put my food down and told myself I HAD to fix it.

The thread break sensor works by flashing a light at a spring that moves with the thread, one cycle per stitch. If the light doesn't flash, it means the spring isn’t cycling because the thread has broken. 99.9% of the time the problem is this light is not shining on the spring properly, but I had eliminated that as a cause of our problem over a year ago.
I knew this was not the problem because I took slow motion videos of the spring moving and the light flashing with every stitch. It moves too fast to see it in real time, but the videos showed that it was NOT missing stitches. If you set the alarm’s tolerance to 10 missed stitches before it goes off, the machine will make ten perfect stitches and shut down. Set it to 5 stitches and it makes 5 stitches before it shuts down, etc.

I pulled the drive housing cover off and there was a junction block dangling there and it happened to have two wires that went to the light. I could not find a place to plug it back in.






I called Innova tech support and got hold of a guy who assumed our problem was the usual one with the light and the spring. Even though I sent him a picture of the junction block and simply asked him where it was supposed to be plugged in, he went through telling me how to do the adjustments of the light and the spring that I had already done a million times, but I humored him for a while. Finally I told him the problem is absolutely not there and I need to know where to plug this junction block in. He coped an attitude and asked me how I knew the problem wasn’t with the check spring/light.

Ha! I have it on video.

After watching the video, he was suddenly nice to me again. Finally, he actually looked at the pictures of the junction block and the drive housing and was shocked. The junction block plugs into the motor’s microprocessor, a good foot away from where it was dangling. No wonder I couldn't find where it went. Someone had unplugged it for some reason, folded all the wires up down in the drive housing and zip tied them together.
He told me where it went, I plugged it back in and ….

Success!!

[masraum]

Nice, congrats on getting it fixed and working correctly!

It sounds like your call was similar to my normal experience. If I ever call someone for "tech" support (I work in IT, I'm pretty savvy), I try to start off the call assuming 1 "they do this all day every day, so listen to what they say because they should know" and 2 "I called them for help, so listen to what they say." But 99 times out of 100, the first person that I talk to either assumes that I'm like the avg caller despite me usually giving them a ton of info about the problem and my troubleshooting so far or they are not the person that I need to talk to but are the person that I need to transfer me to the person that I need to talk to.

[cjh]

Is the going into business stitching quilts for her friends? Both a good friend of mine and my mother in law sew their own and send them out to have the stitching done.

[wdfifteen]

We don’t want another business, but we do quilting for friends and special clients on occasion.

[porsche tech]

That had to be gratifying to get to the solution! Love it when that happens.

[Zeke]

Originally Posted by masraum

Nice, congrats on getting it fixed and working correctly!

It sounds like your call was similar to my normal experience. If I ever call someone for "tech" support (I work in IT, I'm pretty savvy), I try to start off the call assuming 1 "they do this all day every day, so listen to what they say because they should know" and 2 "I called them for help, so listen to what they say." But 99 times out of 100, the first person that I talk to either assumes that I'm like the avg caller despite me usually giving them a ton of info about the problem and my troubleshooting so far or they are not the person that I need to talk to but are the person that I need to transfer me to the person that I need to talk to.

You have to realize that they need to screen calls. I'll bet 90% of their calls are not that technical at all. When they are, you get to talk to a real tech. But that's what you just said. How many callers do you get that are not really technical? Or are you internal?

If you fielded questions from the public you would hear all kinds of stuff. It takes a very special person to listen to people who call with any manner of anger or frustration, listen to them and then say, "Let me get the right person for you."

The worst thing that can happen is that the person you need is not available and asks you to leave a message. That hurts a company's rep and I'm usually not buying from them again. One call can make a difference. Certainly the IP providers don't get this.

[rwest]

So, what is the starting point on the machine?

Does your wife sew all the small pieces into a “sheet” and then the machine sews the stuffing and backing to the front, or does it sew all the small pieces together and then the stuffing and backing, or something entirely different?

[masraum]

Originally Posted by Zeke

You have to realize that they need to screen calls. I'll bet 90% of their calls are not that technical at all. When they are, you get to talk to a real tech. But that's what you just said. How many callers do you get that are not really technical? Or are you internal?

If you fielded questions from the public you would hear all kinds of stuff. It takes a very special person to listen to people who call with any manner of anger or frustration, listen to them and then say, "Let me get the right person for you."

The worst thing that can happen is that the person you need is not available and asks you to leave a message. That hurts a company's rep and I'm usually not buying from them again. One call can make a difference. Certainly the IP providers don't get this.

Yep, I provide a different level of support these days, but in the past, I did provide support to the avg public that was using dial up to connect to Bell Atlantic Internet. And yes, you get all sorts of calls. Most of the folks were OK to deal with, but there were definitely those others that didn't follow directions or wanted to argue with tech support about how things worked. I think I did that for 4-6 months before I was able to move on to bigger and better things.

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by rwest

So, what is the starting point on the machine?

Does your wife sew all the small pieces into a “sheet” and then the machine sews the stuffing and backing to the front, or does it sew all the small pieces together and then the stuffing and backing, or something entirely different?

She designs and sews all of the small pieces together to make the quilt top. This is the artistic portion of the project. I load the top, the batting, and the backing onto the machine and square it up. She chooses a pattern for the quilting that compliments the design of the top, and I cause the machine to quilt that pattern onto the quilt.

[herr_oberst]

Originally Posted by wdfifteen

.....and I cause the machine to quilt that pattern onto the quilt.

Sounds like a line from a Dick Francis novel.

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by herr_oberst

Sounds like a line from a Dick Francis novel.

LOL! I guess I could have said I push the buttons that cause the machine to sew the quilt.