Here's hole #1
Here's hole #1 with the tape set around it:
And here it is with a cut patch. I didn't have any red colored spin material, so I used some black instead:
That looked great! But I didn't have the best luck sewing it:
I went over the long edges twice. There were skipped stitches and the underside looked terrible! Look at all those birds nests on the underside!
Yikes! This is what it looks like trimmed out:
I expected my first patch to be sucky, but wow! Good thing this is going in the backyard, and not on a boat!
The second patch went much better:
I was reversing on the start and end of each line to trap the thread, but note the skipped stitches again.
It looks a ton better than patch #1!
I went back and adjusted the machine again, the point was not as close to the needle as it should have been. I did the hem and there were no dropped stitches along the whole thing!
I'm not really concerned how it looks like, as it will be covered by the edge tape later.
And like I said, no more dropped stitches! I did notice that the needle was a bit gummed up, so I cleaned it before doing the hems. So maybe it was a combination of a dirty needle and the final fine tuning that fixed that problem:
Towards the end, I was manually starting and reversing the stitches at the beginning and end to trap the thread. It gave me a lot more control than the foot pedal.
I'm going to patch the larger spinnaker next, it has more and larger holes than this one. For the two layers of spinnaker material I was using V-30 thread with a #12 needle. Then I'll move up a needle and thread size to do the Dacron clews. I'll try the V-90 thread and a #14 needle for that. I have V-145 thread and #16 needles if it comes to that! Maybe I will need that to sew the bands material.
The machine is completely lubed and working like a dream!
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