Happy days are here again....

The reseller (Andrea of Andeeknits) has loaned me her ex-demo PC10 - and it arrived yesterday (I do love new gadgets! Shiny shiny!). And the fault remains - any stitch cam between L72 and L28 becomes invisible - so it is the carriage at fault, as I suspected. I'm glad I kept on with this because I'm not ready to pension off my EC1/PE1 whilst they still work, despite Silver's lack of interest/support in their old kit. Their response was very disappointing considering this knitting machine is the most expensive thing I own, after my car!

I'll be posting my carriage down to her again in the next few weeks (it will take a while for the part to arrive I suspect). The good thing is I can now pack the durned thing away and get on with some chunky knitting I've been eyeing up. I did try the yarn in question (worsted Peaches n crème cotton, bought in a mad fit of passion right before Spinrite bought them out) on the midgauge and practically broke my hand, in fact I gained a lovely bruise as that was the first yarn I foolishly tried to cast on with on this machine. Technically it OUGHT to work - it's a DK thickness - but in actuality it just doesn't have enough stretch. I've knitted various things (peg bag, jumpers) with it on the KH260 so I know that beast can take it. Also I picked up five balls of James C Brett Marble chunky at the Dream Week - and although the midgauge knits it just fine, it is at the top end of its range really.

So I'm rather chuffed - we finally have a conclusion. It's been doing my head in now for a few weeks. I cannot praise Andeeknits enough - she has listened to my woes on the 'phone and in person, and has trusted me with some kit which I haven't yet paid for. Having played with it, I might now buy - it has the standard cards built in, which I didn't know. Yeah, touching stuff is fatal when it comes to yarn and gadgets - fatal to my credit card, that is.

The PC10 is a rather poorly-thought out replacement for the EC1/PE1 combination. If Silver had thought to ask machine knitters what they actually wanted, or if perhaps their machine knitting division had the heady budgets of yesteryear - we might reasonably have expected a USB connector for DAK, or WinCrea, or some other computerized patterning. We might have expected a connection from the old EC1, because feeding 20 odd cards in for a 200st wide design is still far quicker than drawing white and black dots on a dinky strip of a screen. We might have reasonably expected the ability to read stitch patterns directly from a USB stick, and the ability to accept modern memory cards (CD? SD? MicroSD?), instead of the rather outdated and highly specific card it WILL read, which is not even compatible with the card that the PE1 uses - that was another mistake! You could have feasibly thought that you could design your pattern on an EC1 reader sheet, saved it to the memory card on the PE1 and then be able to use that pattern on the PC10 elsewhere - but apparently not!

Apparently the PC10 is being discontinued - presumably it didn't sell. Ooh, I WONDER why not?! (yes, that was sarcasm). If they'd thought it through better and put a little more effort into the design, things might have gone a different way. As it is, Silver sell expensive electronic knitting machines that cannot pattern without further expense - and they no longer sell anything that does the patterning. Go figure.

It's sad, because the short-sightedness of the one manufacturer still in business, doesn't help promote a hobby that has already gone "underground" (online) to keep itself going.

Ok, rant over - it's too sunny outside to be cross. Things are looking up in my knitting room, and that's good enough for me today.