Embroidery thread tension

[Carol1950]

I have a single head Tajima 1501 embroidery machine that I have been trying to adjust the tension on each needle to be close to the same for all. I have some needles that are butter smooth and constant, while others are close to the same value but very jerky. Then others are almost nonadjustable all together. I have 1 needle with no tension on any adjuster but still has a tension reading of  120 to 135. I need some advice as to what may be going on with some of my tensioners. I have traced all the spools and they are threaded right. Do you oil any of the parts on the path to the needle?  I am not having any problems with sew outs but just want to make quality as good as possible.

Thanks in advance for any help! This is the greatest place for people helping people. It is great in a time when things look so bleak to find those willing to help such as all of you do.

Once again thanks for being here.

[cousette31]

We're new at this lark, but have had to do lot of testing to understand thread tensioning. A few points we've found that cause tension trouble:

- cardboard sided p rewound bobbins, the thread in them occasionally locks as it comes out from the edge where it is against the cardboard. Throws the bobbin tension high. Solution long term is non sided bobbin, but short term (just bought a couple of big boxes of sided bobbins) have removed the flat spring and take sides off the bobbins. Also feed bobbin backwards into the bobbin tension slot (ie. turns back on itself as it comes off the bobbin and out through the tension plate).  A lot of people advocate magnetic cores for smoother tensions, but we found they just massively increased the average tension so that the variations were less noticeable, and we did not want that much bobbin tension.

- madeira cops, the small thread reels, have a separate push on end doughnut to stand on. That needs to be pulled off the central tube slightly to prevent the thread being pinched on the end and causing it to have sudden high tension

- looping of the threads as they come over the top to the pretension. Some threads are worse than others. Solution was to feed from the bobbin over the top of the horizontal aluminum thread guide bar, then on some we fed horizontally through a drinking straw so the thread could not twist, loop and catch around its pretension er or the adjacent ones.

- check check and recheck correct thread path Silly fault is it not going between the tensioner plates but going through the coils of the spring instead, or missing the hook out at the side of the tensioner

- if in doubt change needles.