Hi!
We are planning on buying a commercial embroidery machine. Our eye fell a.o. on the Great Notions' Renaissance embroidery machine. Since we're a small company (3 members family business) and job request are all about less than 100 pieces, this seems the ideal machine for us - regarding its price at approx. 1/5 of what "the big guys" (such as Barudan, ZSK, Toyota) offer.
We saw the machine at a congress, and it looked sturdy and solid to us. But it had a thread breach 4 times in a job 3 by 6 centimeters. The vendor appologized and blamed it on the heat from the spotlight above it, yarn being too dry(?), and too little time setting it up. Also, they said to be firsttimers on embroidery (as are we) and hadn't had the time to properly adjust the machine.
We pulled up several threads on groups.google.com, saying both "hands off; it's crap" and "buy it buy it buy it; good bargain". Now we are confused...
Well, has anyone any experiences with this thing? Are there reasons for buying it immediately / looking the other way and saving good money?