Repairing a Brother 1034D serger

Way back in 2010, I purchased my first serger. Unfortunately, the post office was dealing with the Great American Blizzard of 2010 at the time of shipping, so in their distress they seem to have thrown it around a bit.

I waded through kneedeep snow to fetch it from my apartment's rental office, opened it, set it up, stepped on the pedal and....

....nothing! The machine's motor went WRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR but the machine's needle and gears weren't moving. This cued several readthroughs of the manual to make sure I hadn't missed a hidden activation switch of some kind. However, I couldn't find anything in the troubleshooting guide or setup instructions to indicate that this was a normal out of box function.

Of course, the fact that the motor seemed to be working seemed promising. Being myself, I decided to take it apart and see if I could fix it!

The sadly nonfuctional serger.

I unscrewed the back and the back side to see if I could peer in and figure out what was wrong.

I hadn't realized there was a giant chunk of machinery behind the presser foot. Pretty interesting.

Ohhhh, this could be causing my problem! It was pretty much impossible to get at the back half of the loop there though, so I endeavored to get at it from the front.

The screw on the right was part of what attached the front plastic plate to the machine.

However, the flip down plate elevated my screwdriver to an angle where I couldn't really get at the screw. >:(

So, I flipped the serger over.

There we go.

BAMMO!

An action shot!...a blurry one, because back in 2010, I didn't have a smart phone.

I was able to carefully wriggle the front plate free.

Here are the cute intestines of my serger! I hit it with flash so you could see all the parts properly. Note again the belt flailing around, useless.

Taking a look around. This is the little mechanism that directs the lifting/lowering of the presser foot.

When I was done ogling the mechanical engineering, I pulled the belt forward...

...and popped it on! Then, it was time for the moment of truth: pressing the foot pedal.

Vroom! :D

Rainbow colored test stitching. :)

Then I put it all back together again.

The serger has served me faithfully now for nearly six years. It's a great machine; I highly recommend it. It still goes for only $200 on Amazon!

I'm not usually a fan of Brother sewing products; my primary machine is a $180 mechanical Kenmore. Sergers have a well justified reputation for being difficult to use. They are very particular machines, and most people already have enough difficulty troubleshooting tension problems on a normal sewing machine--and that takes only two thread inputs, compared to a serger's four or more.

When researching sergers on Amazon, I found that the Brother 1034D has a 4.6/5.0 star rating compiled from well over 2,000 reviews--many of those written by people new to using any sort of serger at all. It's really rather unprecedented to find a serger this well liked--probably because despite my initial trouble with the belt, it's rare to find a serger this well built. I've tried a lot of other sergers belonging to my friends, and this one is remarkably well behaved compared to your average Singer or even Janome. It lacks a lot of the bells and whistles found in the $1,000+ category, but you'll spend less time fighting your machine, and more time actually serging. And again--it's $200. With most sergers in that price range, you're better off just lighting your money aflame. At least that will provide some entertainment value, and keep you from wanting to set yourself on fire after a few hours of failing to accomodate a subpar serger's constant thread tension neurosises.