Singer 14SH754 Overlocker Basics and Threading tutorial

Hi, I'm Jamie from Melan Sewing and in front of us is the Singer 14754

overlocker

, commonly known as the small

overlocker

in the UK. These are sold quite frequently in the supermarket. A really very good price and, as a consequence, many, many. sellers go out and buy them, the problem is that a lot of people buy them and don't really know what they are doing or how to set them up and you are constantly reading about problems and errors and very often people just stop using them. one, so I've decided to do a series of

tutorial

s, um um, to explain to you the key parts of the machine, how to set it up, the various fabrics it will make and to hopefully help out some people who bought one or if you're looking to buy one, it needs to be set up well, like I said, these are pretty cheap machines, however, they come with a three year warranty and it is a pretty underrated overlocker, it has quite a few features, such as. blade to cut and finish the edges of the fabric a differential feed that will allow you to gather or stretch the fabric will do two three and four thread overlocking can do flat seams so it is actually a more impressive machine than it looks and it is also very light and very portable, which is another plus, so if we take a quick look at what we have, if we turn it back, you will see 1, 2, 3, four positions to place the thread and also an extendable thread guide that the machine should have.

They come with these little plastic inserts that sit inside the thread cone, allowing the thread cone to sit centrally on the spindles at the back. If you don't put them on, what will happen is that the thread will vibrate and it won't be very pleasant in the right hand. side of the machine we have our standard handwheel like the one found on the normal side machine, obviously there is an arrow there, always turn it counterclockwise towards you to raise the needles up and down, Above it has a dial for the stitch length. In other words, four is the widest stitch and there is f for fine, so the themes are very, very close together.

I'll set it between two and three. Next you have a sliding mechanism and this is for differential feeding. You can control how the teeth feed. work that I will do in another

tutorial

. I'm going to set this to one so it's in the middle and that's the standard straight stitch on the front, we have 1, two, 3, four dials for the tension of the four threads, obviously the machine can be used with two threads and three threads, but again that will be discussed in another tutorial, we have a cutting blade that trims a fabric like overlock and if we slide the front cover out, this blade can be rotated out of the way.

It's not for cutting the fabric and I'm going to leave it in this position for now while we thread the machine right in front of the presser foot, you'll see that the 3.5 markings are 4.5, that's so you can adjust the cutting width using a as a little knob black that you can twist again, we will do that in another tutorial along with a rolled hem feature. There is a little slider if you pull it back to do rolled hems and push it forward to do straight stitches, so this tutorial is really covering the

basics

and we'll thread the machine properly, so hopefully for those of you who have one and aren't sure if they have problems, this should solve a lot of problems by flipping it back like I said. these cone adapters I'm going to put them on my overlocking threads and to the center and I'm going to set this up for four thread overlocking, so we have our four threads, so now we can take each thread in turn and drop it through the guide in the top, make sure it's fully extended, you want the thread to go from the back of the machine to the front and make sure no thread gets caught anywhere else, so just put them through one 2, 3 and four.

Now we come to the first one. As a sort of obstacle on top of the machine, each thread has to pass through small metal guides and I have seen them threaded in many different ways. It's actually very simple to do, but a lot of people get it wrong, so I'm working from the back of the machine right now just to make that clear and I took the free end of my thread and I'm going to hold the free end up. the left obviously if you are working from the front, the free end will go to the right and you will literally slide under the metal tab and pull it up, you will hear it click into place.

Well, the free end can carefully drop into this channel towards the tension discs. Repeat that for all other threads. that you are using, the next challenge we have is getting our threads through these tension discs correctly and I know this causes a big problem for many people, including me. I screwed up, so it's really important that we get it done. the threads placed correctly between the actual tension discs so that the correct amount of tension is applied to the thread as we overlock, if we don't it just won't work the thread uh the overlocking thread is going to go everywhere now that I have my own preference to do this and I always put the presser foot down, okay, people talk about setting them to zero before doing it and all sorts of things.

Always, since it's set to three, here I leave it set to one number, I put the presser foot down which then tightens the tension discs, okay, when we take our thread, I hold the free end and let it fall between the tension discs and I give it a tug holding the back, you will feel it pass between the metal disc. and to test, you can pull it and you will feel that it is being held tightly. A very easy mistake is to put the thread between the plastic disc and the tension disc, which means that you have no tension there, it will make no difference.

Wherever you put that wheel, the tension will be zero, so just check that it passes between the metal discs and snaps into place. The next important step is to make sure we thread this machine in the correct order. You can't just go from the left. to the right and pass the threads because I can guarantee you that it will not work, most overlockers are the same and certainly for this model we start here with the red thread, which is the upper Looper, then we will move to the Yellow, which is the lower Looper then we'll cross over to the green one which is for our right hand needle and then we'll finish on the blue one which is our left hand needle so we'll open the front and we'll start with the red Top Looper so we'll start with the red thread and actually I changed the thread to red and this is for the top Looper, making sure it's fully engaged on the tension discs that come down this channel and there's a little metal bracket, make sure it goes around the thread. support everything is marked inside so we are following this red line which is our top Looper and also the points where the thread should go are marked and they are color coded so we are in red and we are going to follow these red points From our support we go down directly and there is another small support, so we take our thread and place it under that support, so from this lower support we come to this arm and we have to locate the thread. on the guide and put it in place so that it stays there from this point, then we go directly to the next guide and again put it in place, this is where the tweezers come in, from this point we are going to take the end of the thread in our top Looper and this is this arm with the big hole at the end we're going to put the thread through the small hole and if I move you can see the hole at the end, okay, let's take that thread and put it through the small hole, Take the thread out of the back and place it between the Bottom Looper, which is this long arm.

It's very important here, we really don't want it to be left in front of the CU, that can cause problems that we certainly don't want. I don't want it to be on top, it has to be well in between. Finally, we're going to take this top Looper thread and we're going to run it through the back of the machine making sure it doesn't get caught anywhere and underneath it is. a little guide on the presser foot Press and give yourself a good five or 6 inch length hanging off the back of the machine and that's our red thread and the top Looper finished, so our yellow thread, which is the bottom Looper again , it is marked on the inside, but the yellow thread is a little more complicated than the red one, we go through our tension disk like we did with the others and again, like with the red one, there is a little support underneath that we have to go behind , it's easy to overlook.

Just below our first red dot is a yellow dot and we're going to clip it to that yellow dot. Okay, it's literally directly below the red dot and again we're going to go left, so from our first point we are. It's going to come directly to the left and we're going to locate the thread here, we lift the thread from the bottom so it catches on the little clasp, so then we're going to go right next to it, there's another one and Again we need to lift the thread from the bottom to assumption. Keep pulling the thread so you have enough.

Now the next point is on the same arm, but it's hidden just inside. You can see the yellow dot, so we've zoomed in on this. Almost hidden point here and again, we just need to position the thread into position from the bottom and click into place, there we go, so the last part for the Bottom Looper is to thread it into the arm of the Bottom Looper. Many people just take the end and push it in, which doesn't work, okay, we really need to take the thread, take it behind the bottom Looper, push it down as far as you can and it will sit on a little pin and if you do, it won't. you're sure, give it a tug.

Okay, if it slides out, you haven't gone far enough. You have to get all the way to the end and it's practically tucked under where the needles are, so we have our yellow thread. firmly hooked onto the lower arm of the Looper and we can pass the thread through the small hole at the end. Now you will see that the yellow thread goes over the top Looper. It is also above the red thread. Okay, don't go below. this red thread and then we grab the thread and like we did before, we pull it out the back so you can see our red thread underneath for the Top Looper and the Yellow Bottom Looper that goes on top, crosses the thread and just tucks it under. the guide like you did with the red foot, so now we're going to continue with the green thread, which is our right hand needle, if we use both, through the tension disc and then there's a little location tag that we go around and then we come. on the left and there's a big thread guide that we go over and then we go up and you'll see the green dot, so the green dot there we go over and make sure that it fits the thread slots in the back direction, no settles. the top actually goes down to the actual guide and finally we bring the thread to our right needle.

Now there is a crimped thread guide like you find on a standard sewing machine, you simply wind the thread once and finally it passes through the eye of the needle. Which is really hard to see in this video, like you did with the red and yellow threads, just tuck it under. Last but not least is our left hand needle, which is the blue thread and as before, from the tension disc it falls down and through. The same guide that the green thread went through is fine, straight down and then into the bottom slot and there's a blue dot.

Okay, so you have both the green and blue thread running through this guide. Here the green thread goes into the top blue slot. Thread the bottom slot, so finally go down through the little thread guide above the needles right there and then thread through the left needle one more time, pull the thread out the back, give enough and place it under the guide on the foot that is ready for the machine. To continue now just to check that everything is threaded correctly, it is a good idea to take the four threads, hold them slightly twisted at the back of the machine and, using the handwheel that turns towards you, run it two or three times just to make sure nothing getting caught or any horrible noise is that you will hear the thread, but obviously you will be aware if something unpleasant happens and you should start to see a nice string of thread coming out the back now, if you remember, I moved the cutting knife away so that don't get in the way we could see clearly when we were

threading

, its a simple case of pushing to the right and turning the blade back into position, on one occasion it will hit the little piece of plastic here, just turn the handwheel very slightly to clear it and make sure it locks into position and we can close the front again so we can finally run a piece of fabric through and see how it goes.

Don't lift the presser foot like you would on a normal machine every time you put the fabric in, as this releases the tension at the top instead of lifting the front edge of the foot up slide the fabric in, okay just to to get hooked. I'll go waynice and steady and you'll see the blade, the fabric cuts the Fab, the fabric see the blade cut the fabric evenly and far away, now we go carefully and carefully when we get to the end of a seam, unlike a conventional machine where we just You grab the fabric, take it out and cut the threads.

The quick and easy way is to hold the fabric we're going to run out of thread chain Fab uh okay just putting it on the presser foot like this then bring the thread through the front and let it go under the presser foot where it's going to cut off and there we have it and here's the end result, almost straight from the box settings for the tension across the board at three um, you can clearly see the red top Looper, okay, this is the top of the fabric running along the top, you can clearly see the light blue line which is our left needle green line which is our right needle and you can see on the edge the yellow which if I turn it over is on the reverse side so the yellow is our bottom Looper and the key is you're trying to get this edge where the top ones are and the bottom Looper is exactly on the edge of that piece of fabric so there we go that's the end of my first tutorial on the Singer overlocker.

I hope you found it useful. Feel free to write to me and head over to my blog if there is anything. If you are not sure or follow me on social media and I will make another video tutorial on this machine and in the next one we will look at different types of stitches and tension problems, so until then, thanks for watching, see you soon.