r/Bernina

Wondering if this is a good purchase- I've never owned a vintage machine like this before.

It's $200 USD and about a 3 hour drive away (happy to collect as the post man might damage it if shipping is an option).

Comes with everything shown in the photos, is $200 USD okay, and what would be the first bit of cleaning/restoration you would start with on it?

Thank you 🙏

Story time :)

In 2018 I was given an ‘09 Bernina aurora 440. Great machine, seriously phenomenal! But out dated and at end of life. The software gone, the motherboard intermittent…

Last year the main board went completely, but with such a solid machine I had it serviced and ultimately replaced. Cha-Ching!

Then the long awaited embroidery rabbit hole...

Then this summer… no software, no clue, but very curious. I couldn’t fathom spending $3-4k for digitizing software so I set out to build my own. That of course was half the problem with a close to two decade old machine!

I know the tension is way off, the material wasn’t stretched, almost nothing about this ‘works’. However, I am so excited to keep something that was designed to mechanically last decades and revitalize it with a fresh software package!

I need to do some work before a beta release, but happy to share with anyone once ready to deploy. If you’re on mac iOS that will be first, but I hate the Mac/PC divide so apparent in this area, I’ll make sure to release both soon.

Poppy Embroidery is still cooking, I want all the features and all the math for all sorts of wonderful design options but for tonight, I give you for the first time in 15+ years, a little dragon fly! If you’re interested in following along with either www.poppyembroidery.com

Bernina 1008 owners/techs, does this sound off to you?

I recently acquired this machine and was told it had been serviced/restored. I watched some setup videos while getting to know the machine and noticed that it sounds quite different from the machines in the videos. Theirs sound much quieter and smoother and do not have the loud, cyclical grinding sound mine is making. I have cleaned and oiled the hook area according to the manual, but the sound is still there.

What would you recommend having checked? We are moving overseas in a few weeks and I want to get this fixed ASAP. Thank you for any help you can provide!

Sorry to post again about the same issue but I have another video that I’m hoping can maybe help with troubleshooting.

I was giving the shuttle race and hook area another cleaning and oiling this morning to see if that would help at all and I happened to discover something that I thought might be useful for figuring this out. The rattling/grinding seems to be coming specifically from the shuttle race area. When the machine is running and making the noise, applying light pressure to the back of the shuttle race component makes the noise disappear completely.

Is that something a local Bernina tech could inspect and possibly address? If so, is there anything specific you would recommend I ask them to look for?

Hi everyone,
I got used wrecked bernina 150 and i been servicing it, when flipping it to fit a timing pin on the other side i forgot to clip bobbin guard and wrecked b350 clips i was wondering if anyone knows anywhere where i can find replacement as the only one i was able to find was out of stock(link in case my description is not very useful). I’m trying to save myself buying a whole assembly.
Cheers

Hello everyone, my grandma has given her old sewing machine, it's a Bernina Matic Electronic 802. I've done some cleaning inside and it seems to be working fine, is there something I should know about this machine ? Something I should watch out for ? Thanks in advance.

Hi all, I bought a used Bernina off of facebook marketplace. This is my very first Bernina so I’m not super familiar with all of the parts (I have a Janome and singer). I noticed that there’s this grey thing that’s sticking out and didn’t think much of it until I realized that it’s not in stock pictures of the Bernina and also not in the manual.

Do yall happen to know what this part is? She’s currently in the shop being serviced so I’m sure I can ask, it just won’t be ready for a couple of weeks and it’s bothering me that I can’t figure out what it is.

I somehow can’t change the width of my stitch, does anyone have any tips or solutions?

Hello everyone! I bought a bernina 480 from a person who lives across the country from me. Unfortunatly her idiot son basically put the machine in a flimsy cardboard box and it has arrived in one piece but I'm not sure if anything happened inside the mechanism. I've never played with this type of machine, I only had the Activa 134 before to compare to. It seems to stitch proper straight lines and zig zag, but decorative stitches are all wonky. Any advice?

Also, the knee lift only seems to go in at a side angle, she had a 460 Serger so she might have given me the knee lift for that one... Or the whole mechanism inside got knocked around?

My activa has beautiful stitches. This one is super disappointing so far, I don't even know what the baseline is. Shouldn't it work well straight off the bat??

My dtr purchased a Bernina 700 vintage and it was serviced prior to purchase but we can not get the tension to be correct. If I line up the dark line in the middle of the tension window, as the manual states, the top thread loops on the bottom terribly. If I move the tension line to the far right so that I can see the plus sign, it’s better but still looping the top thread underneath. If I move the line to the far left, it nests up so badly it stops sewing. We’ve re threaded it multiple times, bobbin is aligned and in properly. It did work well a couple of weeks ago but we put a new thread type in the top thread. Could it be as simple as making the same thread on top as in bobbin? Suggestions? Located in Belgium.

Hi I have a Bernina Aurora 440 QE with an embroidery module. I was using it to embroider when my thread started stripping and I stopped the machine, fixed it and rethreaded my machine, then a few minutes later the thread snapped. After fixing that the embroidery went from nice clean stitches to very messy and bunched up stitches. I ended the program and am determined to figure out what’s wrong.

Someone I know suggested the tension is too high causing thread issues and I should perform a tension test. My question is can I use the Embroidery Foot #26 to essentially freehand a tension test? Also if so what type of stitch would be best for a tension test.

I attached a picture and you can see the bottom areas have alot cleaner stitches and where the presser foot/needle were issues started occurring.

Any advice is appreciated!!