Polly Shacklady

I spent most of Saturday cleaning, taking a part and putting back together my Brother knitting machine and ribber attachment. I've had it for about 2-3years now and I don't think it's ever worked very well, it drops stitches constantly, bends needles all the time and generally makes a mess. The ribber attachment is worse and I gave up on it some time ago. After trying to find someone to service it (not easy) and talking about it to friends, I decided to have a go myself. So I jumped on my laptop and hunted around for answers. I came up with my sponge bar being worn out, it should have been 1/2'' and it was less than a 1cm. Replacing it was easier than I thought - I found a upholester's that gave me some scraps of high density foam to use. It was a case of pulling out the old foam, dissolving the glue from the metal, cutting the new foam to shape and glueing it in using UHU. I ironed on some woven facing to stop it from catching and there we have it.
My machine actually started working - I was amazed and a little sad that I hadn't done this earlier. Everything started going right, I got my ribber set up and managed to make some decent swatch's.