Help me with my serger - PLEASE!

[AndreaSTL]

If any of you are serger whisperers I would appreciate your help. I have a Singer Ultralock that I have a love/hate relationship with. Sadly, we are in a hate phase right now, and it has been in time out for a few months. I really need to get some skirts finished, so I thought I'd give it another go since we've both had a cooling off period. Before I set it aside I had been hemming skirts with a rolled hem. I had done several without incident, but then the stitches got loose and uneven. I checked the tension and rethreaded it but it the stitches were still bad.

Today I unthreaded it, set all tension dials to 0, reset the tension dials, and threaded the machine. After changing the tension a bit I could get a reasonable stitch, and I got most of the way finished on the first skirt when it started having odd stitches again. I managed to finish that one, but testing on a scrap piece yielded a wad of thread by the needle, and I've just left it that way. The photo with the pink fabric shows this latest development, and the photo with the gold shows the loose and uneven stitches I was getting before. Can anyone help me figure out what the problem is?

 

[Shanazel]

I'm a sergerphobe myself but I can make a useful suggestion. I belong to Pattern Review online and it is a magnificent source of information. Go to Sewing classes, patterns and reviews for sewing machines and more! and look in the messages section. There is a whole sub forum devoted to sergers. Put in your question and expect lots and lots of answers. I am BriarRose over there.

 

[AndreaSTL]

Thank you! I hadn't heard of that site before and will check it out.

 

[AndreaSTL]

I'm posting my findings here for anyone who wanders here looking for help as well as for my future self when I forget what I did.

I visited the site Shanazel suggested but couldn't find an answer. Since serger tune ups are $75 in my area and it already wasn't working I just decided to open that puppy up myself and take a look. I cleaned it out and applied oil, and when I was doing so I thought about getting in the tension dials. Lo and behold there was a little piece of thread stuck in one of them. I pulled it out, and after putting the machine back together it worked!

The Pattern Review link did save my bacon in a different way, though. Sometimes when serging delicate fabrics the stitching tears away from the garment and you're just chaining the thread. I never really knew why it happened; turns out the thread is too heavy for the fabric. You can fix this without using a stabilizer by one or a combination of the following:
-use finer thread
-lengthen the stitch
-widen the stitch
-move the knife so more fabric is being rolled

 

[Shanazel]

Woo-hoo! Way to go. I'd never have had the nerve to go into it that way. Yay, Andrea!!!:clap::yay::clap: