Consew CP206RL Portable Walking Foot Machine

I like the sewing machine but my tension spring broke and have not found one to replace it. I did buy the whole tension assembly which included the spring so problem solved.

My wife was very excited to order and receive her leather sewing machine. unfortunately it arrived with a broken belt cover. Part number w050. just a piece of plastic. Also unfortunately, next we reached out to the seller trough amazon. They informed us they do not provide replacement parts at all. and they gave us the information to contact CONSEW directly to request a replacement part. so we reached out to CONSEW directly. guess what? they only deal with their distributers. They will not even talk to the customer about the parts they have. that was their response at first. the gentleman we talked to told us up front. when we explained that the seller Universal Sewing Supply gave us their information and refused to contact them he took our information and the part information and told us he would get it shipped out to us. nothing came of that phone call. so we reached out to CONSEW again to see what the status was. the person that answered the phone this time refused to even hear my wife out. she just cut her off and kept talking over her and telling her she had to contact the seller. When I called back she was a little nicer to deal with. she heard me out and tried to get the information about the seller so that she could reach out to them to try to get this resolved. but there are two Universal sewing supply distributers and you cant get the address of the supplier through amazon. so now we are stuck returning the sewing machine for a refund. luckily it is within the 30 days or we would be totally out of luck. we will never order anything from Universal Sewing supply again. all over a little piece of plastic.

I gave it 4 stars because of the lack of a good manual and accessories. I purchased it for doing vinyl boat seats. If you are doing basic cushions, then it will do the job but if you want it to do cording or piping then you have a problem. I have not found a piping foot for it so you cannot do piping or cording. I found that some of the Sailrite items would fit but not the cording foot. Someone on Amazon said they found one, but I could not. It is a tough machine and very heavy. You can download the Sailrite manual for a good manual and their videos work well. Good, Low Cost, but not for the person that gives up easily like me. I purchased a Sailrite machine so I can get on with my project.

Machine was just ok out of the box, easy to thread. Sewing through vinyl was good until you tried to slow down or stop, then it would act erratically groaning (not moving) causing you to hit the pedal harder. Then the machine takes off at almost full speed. The addition of the Sailrite Monster 2 Flyweel helped, but the gamechanger was adding the Worker B motor / controller assembly from Sailrite. Now the machine preforms flawlessly, it's a powerhouse of a motor and starts as slow as I want. At its slowest speed it about 1/2 stich per second or slower.

So I ordered two of these, the first one broke after working with it for one hour. The right side turn knob, DO NOT TOUCH the plastic part on the inner. Just touch the outer grey part when turning the drum by hand. My broke so I returned it. Next... the 2nd one I got the "tensioner" knob on the front of the machine with the numbers on it fell off and was wobbly before I even used the machine. I simply removed it and set tension myself without the plastic cover knob. Next.... if your unit keep shredding thread/string you need to adjust the needed. I almost went crazy trying to figure out why this machine would not sew correctly and kept shredding my thread wasting valuable time and energy. Once is simple barely turned the needed so the thread hole was just a hair straighter, WALLAH! Everything worked fine. Also.. this machine's foot pedal sucks. Meaning it's almost like there is no slow just wide open throttle. There is slow but it's hard to get it to go slow. Thx.

Great machine, I use it often for sewing very thick and heavy items. It works amazing!

In an 8 hour day we spent 1 hour fixing the tension mechanism so it wouldn't break threads, we spend 1 hour sewing, and we spent 6 hours fixing the machine. Do yourself a favor, buy the machine, plug it in, run it for 5 minutes and then take it directly to your local sewing machine repair shop for a full rebuild. The mechanism inexplicably froze up mid stitch, bound up solid. The connecting rods were crashed into the casting, the needle carrier was scraping against the upper mechanism. We had to attack it with jewelers files, die grinders, torque wrenches, and micrometer and an impact driver. All of the hardware is mismatched: Philips here, standard there, whitworth on the back, the needle is just vaguely held by a set screw, the tensioners had sharp edges that frayed our thread, and random hardware kept colliding with the castings. Seriously the build quality of this machine is horrendous. The only thing worse is the instruction manual which appears to have been written and illustrated by the 6th grade class of the 1986 Chernobyl public school system. Bad Quality. Not easy to use. Defective workmanship. The foot pedal has two speeds: way too fast and smelly. Drips more oil than a British sports car. I thought i was spending money on a quality precision machine but this is more like a RBMK reactor, shoddily built and engineered by committee.

I previously reviewed this machine and stated that it needed more low speed torque, but it turns out that after the break-in period it sews great. To speed up break-in, I oiled everything liberally and ran the machine at various speeds without thread for 8 minutes in 7-8 different sessions, re-oiling each time, allowing the motor to cool in-between (I don't think the motor actually got hot, but it was simply precaution.). You'll notice that the oil run-off will turn grey with fine metal flakes. This is normal for any machine including new cars.The machine has always produced perfectly accurate stitches (2 to four layers of mid-weight leather) and would do so at high speeds, but now it does the same perfect stitches at really low speeds, which is what I needed. In fact, I can now bump the pedal and fire out one stitch at a time, which is great for sewing around tight curves on very expensive leather upholstery pieces.So approximately 18,000 stitches in, I have had NO needle breaks, NO bobbin skips and only about 2 thread breaks which were not the machine's fault, with all the stitches being extremely consistent in terms of both length and spacing.