I found this great design at machine knitter's treasure chest and immediately began planning a garment around it. Now that all the supplies have arrived, I spent the day marking and punching my first custom card. Okay, not the whole day. Marking and punching cards is easy enough, just be sure to draw row and column numbers on your paper template before marking the card for punching. I tend to get lost in charts with lots of tiny rows and columns, so I was glad the marking went smoothly. This is the design, done in LB 1878 in Natural and Charcoal:
But this is what my machine was doing:
And on the back, I had this garbled mess with the MC being almost all floats:
It was happening when the carriage went one way but not the other, which suggests that the problem was only in one of the memory banks. I'd had this happen before but it seemed to go away on its own. It was never this bad. What's really perplexing is that the problem only seems to affect tuck and fair isle.
I opened up the carriage for the third or fourth time since I got the machine 2 months ago. It has suffered water damage so when I first got it, the cam lever wasn't moving most of the parts on the bottom of the carriage because they were all frozen in place. It took several tries at maintenance before I found and freed all the moving parts. I gave it what I thought was a thorough cleaning and oiling and everything seemed to be functioning normally. My first sweater was done in slip and the carriage performed perfectly, and the fair isle sample I knitted after working on the carriage came out fine, but for some reason, that wasn't the case today.
All I could find that could possibly be wrong was a small collection of fibers wrapped around the spindles of the memory banks. I put it all back together and did some more knitting, and it knitted the pattern perfectly. I hope I'm not going to have to take the carriage apart every time I knit fair isle. I haven't tried a tuck test, so I don't know if that stitch is still affected.
Thanks to MK Treasure Chest for such a great pattern!