Horn of America, Airlifts, and sewing machine tables

I was writing a blog entry a few days ago when the session accidentally closed and poof it was all gone.

Damnit.

Okay, so I've spent the day catching up on mailing this and that, cleaning my desk off (some, anyway), and generating an uncommon amount of paper trash for the garbage tomorrow, and I'm ready to retype everything that got lost.

So what I was going to tell y'all was about the Airlift for the Babe's sewing table. The Airlift is a cool gadget made by Horn of America. It smoothly raises and lowers a sewing machine. Very smoothly. It's truly feather-light: you just press the surface and it lowers to where you want it and then it stops. The action is wonderful. (Here's a picture of a table with an Airlift in it.)

Well, the Babe's Airlift sewing table worked beautifully for a number of years and then about two years ago, it stopped. Froze up tighter than the Indiana winter we were stuck in. I lubed it up, pressed on it, pulled it, but no good. It was stuck.

Fortunately, Horn of America has a lifetime warranty on the Airlift. (It's considered the gold standard for sewing machine tables, honestly; they're really scrumptious.) All we needed to do, they said, was take it in to a sewing machine dealer in the area who dealt with their products and get another. That seemed easy enough.

Ah, but I wasn't thinking of the problems with dealing with people in Indiana. I brought it in and asked them to do something (silly me). After six months, nothing had happened and they had no idea of what I'd been asking them to do in the first place. I figured that it was Indiana and this was about par, but there was still no Airlift, which made using the sewing table very difficult. The Babe was disappointed.

There's a sewing center very near our house and we stopped in there last Saturday while we were romping around doing errands. It's a great place, too: they sell Berninas, including some slicko high-end models like the Bernina 440, which costs about $5000 and does all sorts of things that make quilting that much easier. There's a computer library of stitches and lots of relatively standard gewgaws, but the coolest feature is a free-stitch regulator, which regulates the length of free stitches no matter how fast you're moving the fabric. In other words, the machine does what you traditionally have had to do by getting the right blend of needle speed and fabric speed. (The Babe's eyes were like saucers when she saw those.) As it also happens, the store also sells Airlift products. And they handle warranty problems. And they offered to take care of the problem for us.

They did, too. We got a phone call today to say that our new unit was en route and would be here in a week or two. We might not even have to pay for shipping if it all works out! Heckuva deal!! The Babe is going to have her sewing table back fairly soon, it looks like.

Horn of America, Airlifts, and sewing machine tables