Nolting Longarm Quilting Machine Frequently Asked Questions

Your question comes up pretty often. As you suspected there is much more to the story. I hope I can shed some light the subject.

Hand quilting has always had an influence over longarm quilting. Many of the "rules" of hand quilting apply. 1/4" echoing, 10 stitches per inch, don't cross over your lines and many of the designs all have passed from hand quilting to longarm quilting.

There are many machines that use cones both top and bottom. The mechanics of using cones top and bottom creates a stitch that does not have a desirable look to quilters. I have not yet met a quilter that would like a cover stitch, chain stitch or serger stitch. The process of making a knot is as old as humans. To make a knot with thread that looks somewhat close to a stitch that was hand quilted [the lock stitch] can only be made by wrapping the top thread around the entire supply of bottom thread twice for each plunge of the needle. Over the years the bobbin or shuttle evolved to create the lock stitch.

Next comes quality. Quilters want every stitch to look exactly like the last, both in size [stitch length] and in shape [tension]. Trying to form as many as 2500 stitches per minute where the top thread wraps around the bobbin 5000 times per minute [remember two wraps per needle plunge] or 83 times per second, while sewing in 360 different directions, while sewing with two threads that when looked at with a microscope are very irregular. Let alone batting when held up to a light you can see the density fluctuations everywhere. Then top it all off with a quilt top. A quilt top lovingly made from thoughtfully selected contrasting fabrics, produced by different manufacturers using different production processes and supplies. Cut up and sewn back together with seams and eight point star points. And to add to the challenge we want to perform all this high speed fiber gymnastics and then stick the landing in less than 1/64", the compressed thickness of the quilt top, thin batting and backing. We offer our commercial machines with the L bobbin or the customer can select the M bobbin. M bobbin tension is much more finicky than L. The size of the loop of top thread is more than double the L and retrieving all that thread to create a nice snug lock stitch knot and doing it before the next knot is started is borderline. On a tangent the M bobbin is really made to work with large diameter thread like used in shoes, purses and leather goods. This type of sewing is done at very slow speeds.

We can make a machine with oversized bobbins or shuttles but they would need to sew so slow they would not be desirable. We can make a machine that uses cones top and bottom but the knot is not desirable to quilters. So for now we produce machines that use a bobbin and produce the preferred lock stitch.

I have attached a link showing an animation of the lock stitch being produced. It is not entirely accurate because it only shows one rotation per plunge but you get the idea.