Wonderful Little Basic Sewing Machine

I bought this sewing machine to replace my basic junky Singer. I needed something reliable (and speedy!), as I sew at home for a living. I have heard nothing but good things about Juki, so I figured I would give them a shot. It's been a year now & I'm still very happy with my choice.

This is one of Juki's basic models, so if you don't need all those fancy stitches (you get 20 with this machine) this is for you. If you do, well then Juki has a few other models w/ more of them.

Some of my favorite things about this machine:

1, The needle always stops in the down position (unless youre finishing up a seam). This is very handy when sewing appliqués! Or pockets, or anything else that requires lifting of the pressure foot & moving the fabric around to sew in another direction.

2, Speed. This machine is speedy :) I think it is one of the faster home machines around, with a speed of 900 stitches per minute. I think my old machine was around 500 or so. I definitely noticed a difference. If you don't like sewing faster, you can easily slow things down with the speed controller located on the front of the machine.

3, Automatic Lock Stitch. Instead of manually backstitching when you start & finish your seam, you have a choice of two lock stitches. A reinforcement stitch which just sews a few stitches in the same place, and a reverse stitch which sews back and forth a few stitches. It's just one of those handy little features, but you can easily backstitch on your own if you wish.

4, Less clogging, screwing up, etc. My old machine used to have problems all the time w/ the bobbin messing up or things coming unthreaded or other annoyances. This one has a bobbin problem every now & then, but that's about it; NOTHING compared to the old machine. I guess this is just a sewing machine thing.

5, One Step Buttonhole. Very easy buttonholes! And you get a choice of 4 buttonhole designs! All you do is snap the special foot on, select your stitch, pull the lever down, and sew.


A few things I don't like...

1, The needle stopping in the down position. This a nice feature, unless something is going wrong. Like a bobbin clog or sewing through something that you shouldn't, things that I usually notice a bit too late. I try to stop in time but the needle just has to go down! This has resulted in one or two broken needles :( But this happens rarely, so it's no big deal I suppose.

2, The Manual. I wasn't too impressed with the manual. It goes over everything you need to know, but the way it is mapped out can be a little confusing at times. They try & cram each set of instructions (or description or whatever) in 3 different languages all on the same page. Sometimes it seems as if the quality of the text is lacking just so they could fit all of the languages in a small spot. Oh, and instead of telling you how to oil the machine, it tells you to take it to a repair shop for this... I don't really have time to give my machine up, and I don't think that could be too complicated, so why wouldn't they just show you where to oil?? If you know anything about sewing machines, then you can easily operate this w/out even looking at the manual. If not, then it's not hard at all to figure out, you just have to look past the other languages ;)

In the end I am very pleased with this machine. I have had terrible luck with sewing machines in the past, and this one has outlasted all of the bad ones so far :)