The Bind-Off Process
It seems people are struggling with the bind-off and with holes / breaks occurring whenever people try to knit a bind-off.
Here is how we complete our bind-off and this works 99% of the time - Occasionally we have a dropped stitch due to the roll tension, and also we find this if the machine is not oiled enough - We go through through a lot of oil ! A oiled machine is definitely a happy machine!
For our knits, we are currently running with a stitch size of 7 on the front bed and 6 on the rear bed.
Before the bind-off row, we always knit a couple of full rows of 'knit all front' (stitch size 7), 'knit all back' (Stitch size 6), Speed 200, Roll 140
We then follow the standard bindoff as produced in the software - Speed 60 but reduce the stitch size to Stitch size 4 (Front and Back), Roll 200
About 1/2 way through the bind off we stop the roll completely (otherwise it stretches the knit too much at the end).. You will need to play with this to find out what works for you on your wool. You dont need to do this, but you will have to spend more time steaming the garments due to the stretching if you dont do this.
For us, the key was the extra rows before starting the bind-off, the change of stitch size from 7/7 to 4/4 and the speed of max 60.
Hope this helps...
Tim & Robert
EcoKnitware
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I have uploaded a copy of our working Bind-off to the shared folder that Gerard Rubio has setup. Happy to go through this with anyone if this helps.
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Thank you!
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Thanks
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Gerard Rubio I am still having problems with the bind off. I have followed the advice of Robert Ingemarsson above, but am still getting dropped stitches on the bindoff rows (not before the bindoff with the transfer to the rear bed). I have checked the needles and all seems to be ok, and as there are no dropped stitches anywhere else in the knit I don't think this is the problem. I am wondering if it is down to the positioning of the brushes?
When you suggested before that I reposition the brushes, I found that it isn't possible to put them where you had them in your photo -
There is no way for me to get them in the position you show in your photo as they are already as low as they can be, as shown by my red arrow, using the single larger screw on the top of the assembly.
If you have any thoughts about the dropped stitches, the brushes, or both I'd be pleased to hear from you, as without being able to complete a successful bind off I am a bit stuck!
Thank you...
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That does not look so good... From our experience, that is going to cause problems as the yarn may touch the brushes causing tension issues...
1. Have you confirmed if the yarn is touching the brushes - We never had a problem with bindoff but we did have dropped stitches on the right due to the brushes...
2. What feeders are you using for the knit - 3 and 4 is preferred. We use 3 & 4 for first preference, 1 for bindon and 6 for waste..
Do you have the kcode for the end of your knit . We could try running in on our machine and see if it fails here for you as well if you want
With regards to the brushes, here is out current setup...
We ended up removing the metal clip that the brushes are attached to the machine with (The part with the 90 degree metal section), and gently bending it slightly so it was not at 90% so that the brushes end up away from the centre of the bed.
It took us a while to get them adjusted to the setup for our machine, but this could be an issue.
Do you have any dropped stitches on the right hand side of your knit?
Also - happy to jump on a call if yo want to drop us a message on EcoKnitware to help you get over this hurdle
Tim
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Hi Tim,
Thank you for getting back to me on this. I am not sure if the yarn touches the brushes as it's hard to see - the brushes completely cover the ends of the yarn feeders, so I am guessing that they probably do touch. I am using the same feeders as you - 3 / 4 and 1 and 6 for waste and draw thread. I get lots of dropped stitches on the right, but only when knitting 2 or more colours. It seems to be fine when only using one colour in feeder 3 or 4. It would be great if I could fix this problem too. I looked on the forum and it suggested increasing the tension in the side arms, which I did but even at maximum it only seemed to help a tiny bit.
The k-code I am using is the standard bind off. When knitting on both beds I added a couple of rows of all front and all rear jersey in stitch size 7 as you recommended. I tried removing the roll down half way through, but this seemed to make the dropped stitches worse. I am using a 2/15 lambswool. I have tried making the stitch size bigger and smaller for the last rear bed row, but it didn't help.
If you think moving the brushes would be the next logical step, please let me know and I will try that next!
Thank you for your help!
Debbie
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This is ours - slightly different - but cant see that being the issue.
Katy Grieve, Jipke Lezwijn what do you think as I know you did some work
What is your tension set at on the left - Its should be quite tight - almost on the bottom setting.
We also hit the issue with > 2 colours and dropped stitches on the right with brush issues.
We got to the bottom of understanding the brushes by knitting at very slow speed (25-50) using the speed adjust button, and filming it on a mobile and then watching - its easy to see then.
I would not move the brushes until you have evidence that they are touching just so you understand what you are going to be changing - Try and capture the bindoff failing on a camera so we can work out whats gong on
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Hi Tim,
I ran it very slowly as you suggested to see what the brushes are doing. The needles are pushing up through them.
I am having a problem with bind on which is shown in this video. Maybe this is caused by the brushes? It is just the short rows that are a problem, then it resolves -
And here are the rear and front bed needles working -
The bind off is failing because some stitches, once transferred successfully to the front, miss when they are supposed to transfer back to the rear bed. On a 64 stitch sample this happened 5 or 6 times. No visible signs of the stitches being different or faulty:-
The tension arms on the left hand side are all set to maximum.
Any input gratefully received! Thank you.
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Hi
So, the needles NEED to push through the brushes - This is what opens them so that it all good.
Looking at the first video, I think that it could well be related to the brushes - If the thread touches the brushes on the way back then the tension arms don't pull the the thread, and you end up with it bundling up as it is doing there in the bind on. If you video in slow motion from the right, then you should be able to see if the YARN is touching the brushes - If if is the brushes definitely need moving.
WOHO - looking at the second video - no question - the brushes will be causing your yarn to not flow freely and not have the tension correctly set when pulling backwards.
I am not an expert on transfer stitches I am afraid as we have not had to delve into this as ours works (90% of the time) sometimes we get one stitch dropped, but not often. We do find that when we get a dropped stitch its when we have not recently oiled or hovered the bed. Gerard Rubio, Katy Grieve, Jipke Lezwijn any thoughts on the transfer stitches?
Cadenzaclothes - Do you want us to run your knit through our machine - Happy to do that at the weekend to see if it works on our before changing your brushes.
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First of all, SORRY FOR THE DUBIOUS ADVERTISING ON THE VIDEO UPLOAD SITE! I didn't know it was there until I hit the playback button this morning ;-(
I have done a couple of slow-mo takes from the left and the right and it looks to me as though the yarn is catching on the front brush -
I knitted another swatch this morning using your bind-off set-up, Robert Ingemarsson, with the same results - 5 dropped stitches over 64 stitch width. And I checked against previous swatches, the dropped stitches move about - not the same needles. So, unless you think otherwise, I don't think there is any need for you to run my code, but thank you for the generous offer. Please let me know what you think about the brushes.
If Gerard Rubio, Katy Grieve, Jipke Lezwijn could look too, maybe they have something to add? Just to reiterate, the bind on is messy, and I am dropping stitches on the RH edge when I use 2 or more colours, as well as the dropped stitches during bind off.
Thank you!
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Hi - Those brushes look too close to me - they look like they are touching the feeders which is going to cause you problems.
You can see from our bindon video we have no problems. The fact that it misses stitches on the way back (Right to Left) indicates a lack of tension which we had due to the brushes catching. We also had the same issue when knitting more than 2 colours where stitches were dropped on the right hand side, again due to lack of tension due to the yarn being caught on the brushes.
Fingers crossed fixing this will work :)
Tim
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In order to sort out the brush positioning, could you try the following instructions to increase the gap between brushes?
The idea is that there is a gap between brushes so they don't touch. As Robert pointed, brushes could interfere with yarn traveling through the hole of the yarn feeder, messing up with yarn's tension.
After this, can you try with the bind off again?
Those slow-motion videos are great!
Keep us posted. Thanks!
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This is how our brushes were before we moved them away
And this is the effect it had on the right hand stitches..
With regards to moving the brushes - We found that, with the brush holders as they are it was not possible to move them away from the feeders - we had to slightly bend the metal on this section so it was not at 90 degrees...
From this
to this
this allowed the brushes to be in the right place so the needles go into the brushes, but to be away from the feeders and yarns
This is how are brushes are now...
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Thanks for sharing that info Robert Ingemarsson!
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Robert Ingemarsson Gerard Rubio, Katy Grieve, Jipke Lezwijn
Hi Tim,
I moved the brushes using your method, so they are now positioned like this, rear bed on the left -
I am still having an issue with rows 2 and 3 of the bind on - as per the previous video. There is a slight improvement with the bind off - I dropped a couple less stitches. I tried it with a different yarn as the lambswool I am using (cheaper alternative to the yarn I want to use with a similar breaking strain) is very hairy. You wouldn't know it but I've only knitted a few small swatches since I vacuumed it all and oiled it yesterday! Anyway with a slightly finer and smoother yarn I still dropped 2 stitches on a 64 stitch swatch.
So feeling somewhat despondent as I have no idea what to do next... The brush on the rear bed looks quite bushy but Gerard assures me there is plenty of life in it yet. Might it be that??? Or should I go back to fiddling with the tension???
Thank you all for your support!
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Hi
some Good news on the positive changes this has made.
Our brushes were in that state due to the constant friction. We changed out brushes for the spare pair that came with the machine and have kept the old ones in reserve.
If you ping the kCode across to info@ecoknitware.com happy to run it through our machine and see if we get similar issues - That way it will point to the machine setup or the kCode.
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The brushes look ok, I think they could still last a good while. To understand when they need to be changed, you can run the machine at a low speed and check if the brushes are still opening ALL the latches.
Regarding the dropped stitches during bind-off, I would work a bit around the machine parameters. The take-down roller becomes quite relevant during bind-off. You need to keep your stitches tight but not too tight. Try decreasing the take-down roller value during the process and putting it to 0 towards the end.
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Gerard Rubio I have already tried this as suggested by Robert Ingemarsson, but it didn't make any difference - I still have stitches dropping. The stitches seem to get looser and looser the further along the row I get. I have tried reducing the rear bed stitch size to 3 half way through to see if this helps, but it doesn't.
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Gerard Rubio Cadenzaclothes is using our kcode file which knits perfectly on our machine . Its a simple bindon, a few lines of knit, then a bind off. She is using the same tension settings as us so would expect this to work as outs knots 99% of the time..
Would be great to get to the bottom of this :)
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Cadenzaclothes Thanks for sharing some pictures over email.
The bind-off stitches look ok to me.
Do the drop stitches ever happen in the same needle/s?
I know this same file worked well for Robert, nevertheless, could you try knitting a bit longer, like 10cm extra, before the bind-off so the rollers engage with the knitted rows? Having the rollers pulling from the waste yarn is not ideal as the waste yarn "unravels" if it is being pulled. I wonder if this could make the piece lose some grip with the rollers. Something that is visible is that all the samples are "unraveled" to the same point.
Regarding the bar in the center being hard to pull, that could signal there are bent needles underneath. With collisions, needles can sometimes bend in one of these directions:
(The red lines are an exaggeration, it is usually much more subtle). A needle bent this way can push the bar upwards, making it hard to slide sideways. If this was the case, the needle could be under some stress when moving inside the groove, which could lead to unpredictable behavior/ dropped stitches.
Let us know if any of this improves the situation. Thanks!
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Hi Gerard Rubio
Thank you for the input. The bind off stitches that catch are actually neater than the default Bindoff in the app, but there are quite a few that don't catch as you can see in the first photo. These all seem to happen in the first half of the row (LHS).
The second photo shows stitches that have dropped during the transfer row after the draw thread. So the stitches have not unravelled from the top of the knit down - they have missed because they dropped at the bottom of the work. These stitches that drop during transfer after the draw thread row all seem to happen on the second half of the row (RHS) The 2 photos are the same swatches.
I have checked and checked again to make sure the needles are OK and there is nothing behind the needle bar to obstruct them. The stiches do not always drop from the same needles, but they do always drop when there is a front to rear transfer, never on a rear to front transfer.
I am not really happy about writing k code yet - please could you add a few cm to Robert and Tim's code for me and email it over, then I will run it and let you know if the results look any different. I looked at the code and can see that the stitch size is very small (2/3) at the beginning of the scarf. I haven't had a problem with breaking yarn so this may not be anything to do with it, but maybe you could see what you think?
Thank you.
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Debbie - Just a thought - You said you are knitting the bindon with aa really thin thread - which could mean (as Gerard Rubio says that the knit is not being pulled down properly
Can you knit using proper yarn (nm 7/8) all the way including the bindon as this will then allow it to run correctly into the rollers which are (I presume) calibrated for this yarn..??
Tim
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I tried your suggestion, and having run it once I have what seems to be one dropped stitch after the draw thread, although I didn't notice this during knitting, and one dropped stitch on the bind off row. Thank you for trying!
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Hi - Can you upload the image from this knit and we can compare to how it looks on ours...
Tim
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Here is the knit photo
However, after this failure I sat down and had a hard think...
To eliminate the dropped stitches after the draw thread I decided to knit everything on the back bed, and looking at the fact that all of the missed stitches in the bind off are due to failed front to back transfers, I adjusted the roll down -
And to my delight this worked!
So project for today is to add this to a 2 bed knit....
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Cadenzaclothes thats amazing news..
To confirm - you have reduced the rolldown from 200 to 150?
Katy Grieve can we get this logged into the system so this gets picked up in future iterations of the design software
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Yes I reduced the 200 to 150 and added the 50 that I took off to the next row, just to give a little tug to the stitch before it gets transferred from front to back, as this was when the stitches dropped. At least, that is what I think I have done!
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Cadenzaclothes that little tug to the stitch before it gets transferred is useful. Something I would do is add some rolldown when transfers are done, before knitting the next row.
Happy to modify/review any kocde. You can send it to support@kniterate.com
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I have already done that Gerard Rubio
:-)
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