Dubied Hand Knitting Machine

Dubied Industrial Hand Knitting Machine

My grateful thanks go to the family of Monsieur Charles Hely for donating this machine.

I collected the Dubied from St Brieuc but had no real idea of the weight of these industrial machines. Fortunately for me, the machine was dismantled and ready for me to take away.

This is the only industrial machine I have and it needed a deep clean as it had been sitting for many years in the attic and unfortunately it was suffering from rust.

After I had set it up in my packed shed, I cleaned it up with a lot of elbow grease, petrol and oil. Loads of the needle springs that are required to keep the needles in place were snapped and rusty and I am in the process of trying to get some of these.

Looking for further information about this machine

The machine looks from about the 1930’s – the row counter defines the fact it is an old vintage, however, information on these machines is hard to find – for all I know it could be even older. I have been searching on the web for a manual relevant to this model with little success but I will keep trying. I would love to know the actual age of the model - there were several books given with the machine but none that are relevent to this Dubied.

Once the bed was de-rusted and oiled it knitted on the needles with the springs under, easily. It knits as a double or a single bed and has a tucking cams to do Fisherman Rib Variations plus a racking facility.

The yarn carrier is separate from the carriage and is picked up by moving the wooden handle on the top of the carriage. It has 3 yarn masts and a set of 2 yarn holders, however I am unable to fathom out how to get the front side of the machine yarn carrier to operate. The carriage does pick up the carrier it does not set the yarn within the needles – it’s a learning curve. The handle that operates the machine has a large circumference, however, I only use the top wooden handle to move the carriage back and forth as I am not using the full needle bed.There are about 40 missing springs, in the meantime I have supplemented these with springs from a spare bed however they are slightly smaller.

Industrial Dubied 7 gauge Type CS

Its knits industrial yarns with ease and I have an abundance of these so watch this space, its seriously good news to have a machine that knits fine industrial yarns. There is a 6 colour changer, but again, I am unable to get this to work, many of the old nuts and bolts that put things together with this machine are rusted solid and I do not have the physical strength to undo these. Its at times like this I miss my son who would have been able to tackle this no problem.

Final thoughts

My final thoughts are on how lucky we domestic knitting machine knitters of today are as the domestic machine is so much easier to operate and so much lighter. Knitters who operated the industrial machines of old must have needed a motor to operate them and probably used them to earn an income.

In fact I need motors nowadays just to operate my main domestic and semi-industrial machines. The amount of patterns we can do and the ease of actually doing them is so different from the old industrials – there were gadgets for these machines too but they look quite complex in comparison.

The good news is I now have my first industrial gauge machine to use up my fine yarns on and to be honest I just love classic designs so as soon as I get the required springs I hope to knit more with it.

#industrialgauge