This is the Teflon foot. It is shaped like a regular foot - no gate/guide. It is made out of Teflon and slides over any material that may be too sticky to work on with a regular foot, causing the material to bind up or the stitching to get stuck in one place and leave you having to tug away - or push - on the machine and the materials. It is good for leather, rubber, PVC coated nylons, and was also advantageous for the Dow Weathermate material which has a soft side and a coated side (the coated side being very sticky against the normal presser foot). This particular Teflon foot has been ground out just like the rest of the feet for the Brother DB2-B791-o15, the slot has been widened and lengthened to accommodate the needle-feed motion.

Well, not exactly unlimited, but to no point of return at least. They have been grinded away, smoothed, and altered, so there is no reason to look back now. As you may read in some of the other posts under the Brother Feet Category, the feet are now ready for sewing, and in fact are in use. There are still a few glitches with some of the feet that had their hinges crimped and now do not want to pivot as well, but all in all they are working the same as before. Some of the worries about having burs or sharp edges that would be abrasive to materials and thread have been alleviated. There has been no problem with the needle coming down on any area of the presser foot’s “sole”, not in the forward motion, or the reverse feed. The reverse feed was the most noticeable problem. There was room for error if something were not in proper sync because of a sudden thickness in material or maybe a rapid tug at the thread causing something to lock up and then have the reverse mechanism over compensate only to have the needle come crashing down at full force into the presser foot sole (just ahead of the hinge) and send the tip of the needle to who knows where (or possibly jar the needle-bar out of position). This kind of situation was unlikely in the forward motion because of the way the needle travels, but if you consider that the needle is coming up, moving forward, coming down, and moving back again, then it would only brush against the back of the presser foot slot - in the forward drive as it begins to come up again for another stitch. If we then reverse that, think where the needle is traveling backwards now in the up position and then coming down at the back of the foot before penetrating the fabric and completing the stitch, then moving towards the front of the machine and coming upwards for another cycle. This is hard to communicate clearly at times, hopefully there is time to make an animation or short video of this to help illustrate more precisely how a needle feed mechanism works.

Starting from the left.

Thumbnail number 1 shows how much material has been extracted from the foot. The line is the best approximation of how wide and how long the foot’s slot used to be. By grinding the slot out in the direction of the arrows, it was possible to open it up enough to make proper room for the needle to pass.

Thumbnails 2 & 3 are good illustrations of how much extra room was needed around the needle. As you can see - the needle is now fairly well centered within the slot of the foot. This is also a good picture to see the elongated hole in the feed-dog, which is below the throat-plate. With the Dremel at hand working on the presser feet, it seemed reasonable to smooth out the edges of that elongated hole (essentially rounding the edges off). In this image it is still how it came from the factory, but with a little bit of work, the hole is much smoother around the edges now. There is a noticeable difference in the thread’s movement through the hole when sewing and pulling excess thread for trimming. Although this may not be necessary - it is a very good trick to help your machine sew more consistent stitches.

The header image is a left handed 1/16″ hemming foot. This one has been ground all the way down to the gate itself - this was necessary as the narrow slot does not allow much room for finesse in such a situation. However, these two feet (the right and left hand 1/16″ hemmers) were the easiest to be consistent with because the gate was the end point of what needed to be ground out so seeing where to stop was simplified. Ideally, the slot would not have been ground so far back towards the hinge of the foot, but sometimes human error takes over.

The feet are back. So the story goes - in short. They are not correct, nor were corrected, but rather modulated(?). Considering that the idea was to leave the feet with a machinist who could use the proper tools for the job it is kind of educational to know that they did what was already being done. Although using a Dremel tool is much more delicate and slow compared to the grinding wheel that the machinist used. They simply took the eight feet to a grinding wheel, jammed them in and pulled them out. Most of the cuts appear to be wide enough, but none of them look to be wide enough in the right places. More often than not, the groove is cut too far to the left hand side of the original slot. Not to mention that due to using the grinding wheel there are certainly sharp edges which must be filed down. So after all this - it is back to the Dremel tool and the already slow process is back in play. Hopefully with a little time and patience the feet can be resurrected, because at the moment they are a sad sight and almost embarrassing to admit to having to use. There are a couple that need replacing because whatever they clamped them down in, clamped them down too tightly and ended up pinching the area where the hinge is - and now they do not pivot freely. Hopefully those two are not hard to replace. Fortunately there are a few good sights for this;

the first is - http://walking-foot.net/_wsn/page4.html which is dedicated to the walking foot machine, although if you look closely you will see other presser feet for sale, in many different shapes and sizes. This page is amazing if anything just for the immaculate machine work done for all of the feet. If your the kind of person who enjoys truly amazing and well crafted tools or components, then this is a place to see. It is a shame that this page on the internet is not displayed to more audiences in the mechanical world.

another is - http://www.sew-europe.co.uk/p_feet.htm which is a more broad retailer of presser feet out of Liverpool. This page is very complete. It is hard to say if the shipping costs from Liverpool are worth the variety of the feet or vice-versa, but look for yourself.

there is yet one more, but at the moment is in hiding apparently. It turned out to be a good source for Linko 211, 212, 214, 220 and other split-foot_asymmetric feet (compensating feet) often used for curves and pockets that travel on the inside radius of curves. Well, it is nowhere to be found but at least there is also,, http://www.westchestersewing.com/feet/accessories/feet.htm