In Which Knitting Machines Keep Coming Up.

Coincidences

Roughly twenty years ago I started hanging out on a particular IRC channel, where I met a bunch of people who are still chatting together today – though they’ve moved from IRC to Discord, because modernization, changing times, etc etc. It’s an eclectic group of folks with a wide variety of hobbies, from historic re-enactment to geology to the revivification of ancient computers. That last one is where this gets interesting. My friend shared this story:

I’ve been diving headlong into old Macintosh stuff lately, and part of that is software archiving/recreating floppies/etc. I found myself needing more storage, and bought a very nice mediabox for stuffing a ton of floppies into.

Yay! But it arrived… full of old floppies. Some of them were labeled “Amiga”, some were odd numerical things like “930 format” “940 format” etc… and I think half of these are for a Brother KnitKing 930/940 class machine.

These are some of the disks he has:

So I was doing a search on KnitKing 940’s and–

Reader, he found this very blog.

In the span of 3 hours I’ve gone

“Yay! I got this thing working, I can read Amiga diskettes!”
“Yay! I can load the images into an Amiga emulator and they work!”
“… what the f*** is this”
“ok why does it say 930/940?”
“… the f*** is a knitking…”
“holy s*** these things cost $1500”
“Wait…. Knitting pirate…. knitting ninja and knitting pirate I know these tw- HOLY CRAP I KNOW THIS PERSON”

What a small world it is, sometimes :)

One Thing Leads to Another

In the inevitable discussion of knitting machines that followed, and the differences between electronic and punchcard machines, I found a punchcard machine for sale. Locally. For a very, very low price. The listing included a garter carriage.

With Michael’s encouragement and promises to help me with any necessary repairs, I brought home a sun-yellowed KH890 that included nearly every accessory – down to the original bottle of oil, the ravel cord, and the wee chunk of wax in its case.

Unsurprisingly, the sponge bar was completely flattened, so the first step was to replace it. And the second was to soak, clean, scrub, and oil every single needle, because they had just a bit of build-up and corrosion…

While the needles were drying, I checked the carriage to make sure that all the little flippers were flipping properly, none of the springs were missing, and everything was clean, lint-free, and oiled. After re-inserting all the needles, I carefully ran the carriage across the bed. That felt fine, so for the next step I inserted a punchcard, advanced it, ran the carriage across, and… none of the needles were selected.

End needle selection worked, because that function is controlled by the carriage, but there should have been a bunch of other needles selected too. Well then. We brought the machine down to the workbench and disassembled it. Here’s the inner workings of the card reader – the white rotary cam shifts the little metal pins that were selected by the card; the pins shift the black rods; the rods shift the long nubby plates; the nubs hold the needles as the carriage passes over them so that they emerge from the carriage in either ‘normal’ or ‘selected’ positions.

We cleaned it all out, wiped it all down, liberally dosed it with lubricant, and tried to figure out what could possibly have gone wrong. Armed with the service manual and a playlist of “Ask Jack” videos, combined with the help of folks on Ravelry’s Machine Knitting group and the Machine Knitting Chit-Chat group on Facebook, we eventually figured out that the timing belt needed to be adjusted… and voila!

Next up: testing all the functions, and then the garter carriage.

Taking something apart and putting it back together again is a fantastic way of figuring out how it actually works. The mystery of needle selection is no longer a mystery!