Why is my embroidery machine breaking needles

Why is my embroidery machine breaking needles

Troubleshooting breaking needles


There are a couple of possible reasons why you are breaking needles.

1) Are you sewing Caps or flat goods?
2) Are the needles breaking at the eye or further up the shaft of the needle?
3) What happened just before this anomaly occurred? Birds-nest for example...
4) Where is the weird noise coming from? Behind the needle bars, On the sides, is it a 
    grinding noise or a squeaking noise. Is the noise coming from the bobbin area?
5) Are you oiling your rotary hook every 4 hours?
 
You may want to check your hook timing, to do so follow these steps and let me know what you find.
 
1) Set your machine to needle number 8, by pressing the number 8 on the control panel
2) Remove the needle plate.
3) Power off the machine. 
4) Rotate the main shaft wheel in the back of the machine two whole rotations then set it to 200 degrees.
 
5) Your needle should be all the way down now, look behind the needle and locate the hook point located somewhere behind the needle on the rotary hook. The hook point will be the tip of what looks to be an open end of a pair of scissors. The tip should line up right behind the needle, and the gap between the needle and the hook point should be about the distance of a slender business card, or .50mm. Push needle 8 backwards towards the hook point and see if the hook point is resting up against the back side of that needle, if it is then the rotary hook is breaking the needles, and you will have to adjust the hook timing.
 
That rotary hook spins and the hook point picks up the upper thread and joins it with the bobbin thread, If the hook point is too close or resting against the back of the needle, then the rotary hook point is snapping the needle as it makes contact. There needs to be a gap as I mentioned of about a half a millimeter. 
 
If the rotary hook point is not aligned directly behind the needle, than slowly turn the wheel in the back of the machine until it does line up behind the needle, and let me know what degree the wheel is set to when the hook point does line up directly behind the needle. Hook timing is optimum at 200 degrees, but it can be set anywhere from 198 to 202 degrees, depending on how long the eye of the needle is. If your hook point is lined up behind the needle less than 198 or more than 202 then you will have to set hook timing.
 
Also one more thing, just under the needle plate you will see the trimming components, There is a silver piece and it slides underneath a black piece that has SWF engraved on it. Look at the silver knife part, this piece should be almost all the way under the black piece, the only part that should be sticking out it just a small triangle of the silver knife.
 
The silver piece is what swings open and collects the upper thread and the bobbin thread, then it pushes it under the black piece which does all the cutting, as I mentioned the only visible part of the silver knife should be the triangle tip. If you notice that the head of the silver piece is sticking out more than what I described, than your needle may be striking that component causing to break. 
 
If you do find that this silver knife is sticking out more than described, grab a hold of it and swing it out from under the black piece and see if there is thread jammed up under the black peice causing the knife not to go all the way under the black peice, also look under the black piece, you will see a very thin piece of metal, this is called the under thread presser. If it looks like it is bent upwards or sheared part way off, then this would inhibit the silver knife to close all the way.
 
To test the movement of the knife do the following.
 
1) Turn the machine on.
 
2) Turn the head off so that the needle will not go down when we do a thread trim, we do not want to break any needle if the knife is indeed sticking out from under the black peice more than it should. To turn off the head, simply toggle off that switch just above the red light, once the red light is off then the head is turned off.
 
3) Do a manual thread trim and watch the movement of that silver knife, You should see it open and then go back under the black piece, and as I mentioned the only bit that should be sticking out of the black piece when the knife finishes its motion, is the small triangle at the rear of the head of the silver knife.
 
If it is sticking out look for what may be causing it to not go all the way under as described above.