Thanks again, you've been very helpful.
Will pass on the my wife, who is the one to use it.
P.Isaac
Helen Fleischer wrote:
Good luck with it. If you can find it, _Tami Nobuyuki's Knitting Machine Workbook Number 1: Basic Techniques_ is an excellent way to learn either machine. It does rely on the machine's manual to fill in some info on
what the carriage settings do, but you can also figure that out by
fiddling them and seeing what they do to the selected needles.
Come to think of it, that book is how I learned to knit on my Genie 710, since it was my first machine, and I still have those 710 settings
copied into my workbook from the manual, even though I was a good girl
and included my manual when I traded my machine in. Here they are:
Needle Positions:
A: non-working
B: working position, general work
C: partial knitting position for pull-up and tuck
D1: pattern knitting position
D11: pattern knitting position for fair isle
E: Holding position
Cam Lever Settings
I : Knitting any position but A
II: B and middles, partial knitting
III: Holding (B&C only)
Notice that you have those levers on both sides of the carriage, so you
can control that action such that it works in one direction and not the other. That is something you want to avoid doing by accident. Frankly I wouldn't put a lot of faith in what I copied in about the cam lever settings. I really did not understand short row and holding positions
very well when I was first learning the knitting machines. The fact that
I had those 2 multi-position cam levers when all around me had a single switch on the carriage didn't help matters much.
Buttons
Tuck: used for tuck stitch patterns
Part: used for fair isle and slip stitch patterns
Plain: cancels prior button settings
Change Knob: N=normal, WT=weaving, MC=fairisle
Weaving pattern buttons: N=normal, WT=weaving
I think you'll find that apart from having the holding cam levers
instead of a single hold switch and having extra positions on the needle bed, the carriage controls work very much the same as the KnitKing. The
big difference will be in the pattern controls. The Genie has a row of buttons and the arrangement of down and up positions of those buttons
is what controls the needle movement in groups of 8. When you put that
odd little wrench on the slots of the knob at the back and push it to
the side like a lever the selected needles move. You select which
needles move to pattern positions and which stay back with the buttons.
You can reverse that selection without changing the buttons, by the A-B selector.
To see that in action, push every other button down. Use the lever to select needles. Move the carriage across and they'll go back to the
pattern working position. Switch to B and operate the lever, and the opposite needles will come out, the ones that stayed back the last time.
You can also put needles into the various positions by hand to alter
that pattern in ways not divisible by 8. Or just do it from scratch
without using the mechanism at all. Actually you can do the manual selection with the punchcard machines, too, and with any brain-dead electronic machines you may find. However many purely manual machines
lack the sort of carriage that lets you do fair isle in one pass.
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