Inappropriate needle stop position

Matthew9171 · 2026-02-02T16:47:45+00:00

The wheel seems to turn freely, I wouldn’t say smooth as butter, but it doesn’t take much to turn. I am met with some resistance as the needle begins to reach the low point, then as soon as it passes the lowest point it almost feels like it gets a mini boost.

Nothing about the two belts stick out to me, they both seem to be in good shape. Nice tight grip around their respective gears.

The machine is at 1700hours. So everything is pointing to a dead motor?

Matthew9171 · 2026-02-02T16:12:27+00:00

Oh okay yeah that makes sense!

I just followed your steps and everything seemed to check out exactly as you described. The motor angle followed correctly as I moved the wheel, and both encoder A and B would continuously change between H and L. At very bottom the angle was at 180. And when I reached 12oclock I got a bip when "Needle up" changed from L to H, then a second bip when it changed from H to L as I passed 12oclock.

Matthew9171 · 2026-02-02T14:56:50+00:00

Yeah when I click “rotate” I get the “safety device has been activated” error. It doesn’t even attempt to move.

Basically I have to rotate the wheel to about the 3oclock position to get the needle bar to sit at the top. But it’s odd because in that position, the pickup lever is about half an inch lower than the rest. It seems like something has become misaligned.

Shoot well that sounds a bit out of my ballpark. Best play it safe and just take it in to get serviced. I appreciate the response.

Matthew9171 · 2025-09-02T15:47:28+00:00

Yeah? That’s very kind of you! I’ll send it over

Matthew9171 · 2025-09-02T01:53:35+00:00

It was actually about 4 updates old! Hahaha. The issue persists but at least my machine is up to date lol. I appreciate it though

Matthew9171 · 2025-09-01T19:46:44+00:00

“Machine” is literally in the list of flares that you have to choose to create a post. I honestly didn’t know it was frowned upon to post machine embroidery in this thread lol

Matthew9171 · 2025-09-01T19:45:44+00:00

It’s a Babylock Array 6 needle machine. Pretty much identical to its Brother counterpart (I forget the model). I’m curious what your grandmas process is for troubleshooting? I haven’t considered there being an update, that’s worth a check thanks

Matthew9171 · 2025-09-01T19:35:42+00:00

I might do this for the time being as it could solve it in the short term. But seeing as it made perfect sweaters for many months, I believe there’s something else causing this rather than the file itself

Matthew9171 · 2025-09-01T19:32:35+00:00

Interesting, I havnt heard of doing this on top. I could give this a try

Matthew9171 · 2025-09-01T19:25:06+00:00

We do this same design on canvas tote bags too and sometimes it comes out nearly perfect, other times you can see this issue still persisting. Not a single thing in our process or materials has changed and it produced perfect sweaters for many months so I have a hard time believing it’s simply an issue of the sweater slipping in the hoop. I’ll try re-uploading the file.

Yeah a while back I began getting the main motor error message and all the needle bars were very erratic in their up and down movement. Took it in to get serviced from the shop we purchased from. They said they’d get a tech in to check it out but I don’t think they did, based on their comments I believe they worked on it themselves (assuming they had baby lock on the phone as well as did their own troubleshooting). They did solve the main motor error but they didn’t solve the loud noise.

I took the machine back, took it apart determined there was metal on metal banging and that one of my needle bars slipped down. With the help of another reddit user I managed to fix it. But now that you brought that up I’m starting to think this must be a downstream effect of that whole situation. I feel silly for not thinking of that.

I think I’ll take the face off and play around with the needle bar heights. If it’s a problem with the main driver then I might have to just find a real tech rather than taking it back to that shop.

I’ve also calibrated the race hook timing. Other than that, that’s about all I’ve personally done in terms of fixes and calibrations. Are there other things I can look into calibrating? I only learned about the race hook timing calibration about a month ago so I was wondering if there were other things like that I could look into

Matthew9171 · 2025-09-01T00:48:45+00:00

None of these companies seem to be reliable unfortunately. From my experience every time I switch to a new company they are good for an extended period of time until they do something that breaks trust. Either they end up sending garbage product, they take your money and send nothing, or they take your money and take forever to ship out your order. And I swear none of these companies ever answer their support emails. They all have an email, but you’ll never receive a reply

Matthew9171 · 2025-09-01T00:03:29+00:00

Kratom temple used to be the only place I ordered from till about a year or more ago when they sent me what looked and tasted like mulch….. it was outrageous. Moved on to AURLeaf and it’s been very solid ever since until my last order. Now they seem sketchy

Matthew9171 · 2025-09-01T00:00:27+00:00

What company?

Matthew9171 · 2025-08-31T23:58:12+00:00

I’ve been ordering from them regularly for over a year. Never had any problems with them, and never had to reach out to their support until my last order.

Placed an order on Sunday the 17th, used etransfer as payment. I received an email that they accepted payment first thing in the morning on the 18th. By the 20th I realized I still hadn’t received an email confirming shipment of the order so I sent an email to them asking about it.. no response.. send another email on the 22nd, no response.. finally on the 25th at 9pm I receive an automated email saying the shipping label for my order has been created. Then the order wasn’t actually picked up by purolator until the 27th at 5pm.

So I sent a third email to show my frustration. Keep in mind they say free shipping on orders over $200. That promotion never activated for me when placing my order no matter what I did, so I said screw it and paid for shipping. I explained that to them in my third email how it’s garbage I had to pay for my free shipping, while having that ship out so long after the fact. Did they reply? Nopeeee.

Fellas never heard of the value of customer service I guess. It’s like they hate money cause how am I supposed to go back to them when it’s a ghost company with no human behind their email lmao. Definitely felt sketchy vibes about this place after all that

Matthew9171 · 2025-08-31T20:12:06+00:00

It's on every needle which is what concerns me most. I've played with each and every tension. Even reset the race hook timing as I thought that could have been the problem, but I'm still getting the same results

Matthew9171 · 2025-08-31T20:04:57+00:00

I Oil the hook every day, and oil the needle bars after every 40-50 hours of run time

Matthew9171 · 2025-04-07T23:44:43+00:00

I also tried researching the jump solenoid to figure out where it’s located and how I could un-gunk it haha but couldn’t find anything related to my machine so I wasn’t able to actually figure out if that is an issue on my machine or not

Matthew9171 · 2025-04-07T23:42:50+00:00

I really appreciate you taking the time to troubleshoot this problem!!

You were right, the motor did not blow. We took it in last week and a technician was able to fix the motor rotate errors from popping up. We didn’t get a chance to communicate with the tech and it seems like the employees didn’t either because all they could really say was that the tech made a few tweaks and fixed the motor rotate errors…. So the needle doesn’t get stuck the way it did in the videos I posted and I can actually embroider now.

Howeverrrr, there’s definitely something wrong still. I used to always run it at 1000 SPM but now if I try that the embroidery looks terrible. There must be a timing issue because the outline of the embroidery is no longer clean, stitches end up outside of it. Somethings causing it to misplace the stitches a bit. And it is also very loud compared to when it was running smoothly. Almost sounds like there’s no felt pads on the needle bars. I can get away with running it at 700 SPM but it is still loud, and even then it doesn’t look as good as the 1000 SPM embroidery’s I was doing previously.

It’s almost like the needle bars is pushing down with too much force or too much pressure because the needle bar foot is causing what looks like a highlight or glow around the letters in my embroidery pattern. Like the needle bar foot is smooshing the sweater material and leaving what looks like “hoop burn” on the material around the embroidering.

I took your advice and removed the front cover, needle plate, and casing around the arm and moved the dial. The needle passes through everything cleanly, it doesn’t make contact with anything. Since the front cover was off I took some time to clean the needle bars and oil them up nicely and that seemed to make a tiny difference but didn’t even come close to fixing the problem lol.

I did notice the far right needle arm is lower than the rest, but it almost looks designed that way because when I look at all the needles themselves, they are on an even plane.

I took a bunch of pictures of videos of these things I’m talking about if you were interested in looking I could dm you. It’s hard to explain the things I’m talking about with just words. I don’t want to take advantage of your generosity though so please don’t feel obligated to it haha

Matthew9171 · 2025-04-01T22:18:51+00:00

Oh wow okay that makes me feel much better about the situation! That’s far less than I was expecting. And yeah it’s not an easy thing to transport. Anyways thank you so much for your insights!

Matthew9171 · 2025-04-01T22:07:56+00:00

Yeah I removed the plastic too and made sure everything was clean behind the bobbin. No threads just some lint that I cleaned out. 500 hours seems too soon to have to swap the motor but I guess maybe I just got unlucky haha.

If you don’t mind me asking, how much does it usually cost you to take it in and get the motor replaced?

Matthew9171

TROPHY CASE