Does the inside of your machine look like any of these?
Here are a few pictures of sewing machine and serger ‘innards’ that I’ve taken during the course of my service work. Some of them are rare or even once-in-a-lifetime occurrences, while others are quite typical. All of them give an insider’s view of what your service tech may see when he or she pulls the covers off of your machine…
That little thing in the tip of the tweezers is a cocoon with an insect still in it. It came out of one of the holes in the black plastic bit to the left. The cocoon and insect blocked the passage of light into the sensor and caused the machine to not work properly.
The very colourful stuff you see here is partly strips of off-cut fabric that somehow made their way into the serger, and partly fabric dust and fluff. Aside from the fabric possibly getting caught in moving parts and damaging them, it also absorbs lubricants and can make the machine wear out faster.
It’s hard to tell from the picture, but these cables had been chewed by a rodent or rodents. The machine wouldn’t work until I had replaced them – the cable, not the wee beasties. I’ll leave it to your imagination to figure out what else the squatters left behind…
This is actually a pretty common occurrence. Sewing a lot of flannel, fleece, or minky, or doing a lot of quilting with your machine, will cause this kind of buildup to occur faster.