These are just standard needles. Nothing special about them.

Doug
s/v Callista

"Keith" wrote in message
...
Yea, what Glen said. I would add that Sailrite makes canvas needles for
regular machines. I've used these successfully on a regular home machine
on
light to medium canvas stuff.

--


Keith
__
My wife has a slight impediment in her speech. Every now and then she
stops
to breathe. -Jimmy Durante
"Glen "Wiley" Wilson" wrote in
message ...
On 01 Apr 2004 23:37:44 GMT, (MLapla4120) wrote:

Do you guys know of good sewing machines for sailwork, canvas work?
I'm thinking of getting one to make my own sails and canvas work. I
would
love to hear from people who have done this and are happy or not with
thier
purchase.

Thanks in advance,
Mark

The standard answer to this question is to try Sailrite
www.sailrite.com. I've had one of their Sailmaker machines for over a
decade (I bought it used) and I wouldn't swap it for most people's
boats. It's overkill for your stated purposes (and mine as well) but
they have a much more extensive product line now, with some reasonably
priced machines that look perfectly adequate for a single user. I've
found their customer support to be flawless. Their emphasis is
self-sufficiency and they stock all kinds of spare parts, along with
CDROMs that shows exactly how to disassemble, reassemble, and tune
critical parts of the machine. I've used it when I buggered something
up, with the result that I feel I could fix the machine anywhere.
Sailrite does most of the large boat shows, and they always seem to
bring along a couple of machines for shoppers to try out.

That said, I'm sure you could find a perfectly serviceable machine
elsewhere, possibly for less. You mileage may vary, but I find
several features to be important:

A) As large an opening as possible to pass rolled up sails/canvas
through
B) Smooth, powerful feed mechanism
C) Ability to handle multiple layers of thick fabric. It's pretty
easy to get up around 10 layers of fabric doing canvas work
D) Handles the big industrial spools of dacron thread
E) It was a surprise to me, but a machine that's easy to hand crank
is very handy. In the sail loft, the guy operating the machine has
assistants and equipment to support and feed long rolls of sailcloth
through the machine. You may not be so lucky. When you have to stop
every few seconds to realign the fabric, you might find it easier and
more controllable to just hand crank. I often do.

Even with a great machine, quality work takes practice and patience. I
haven't got enough of either, but I found that I could turn out
serviceable pieces from the very beginning.

Good luck;

Glen

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