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The little piece of plastic with a knob on the end doesn’t look like much. Just a few inches long and one of the only pieces of the Sailrite Ultrafeed Sewing Machine that isn’t made of metal.
But the patent-protected Posi-Pin Safety Shear is a game changer for sewers who are pushing their machines to the limit with multiple layers of upholstery fabric, sailcloth or leather.
The pin breaks when a Sailrite sewing machine’s balance wheel rotates but the needle it’s driving can’t pierce the material. And when the pin breaks, it relieves tension that would have caused the machine to jam, break a needle, jump out of alignment or maybe break something else.
Machine owners can then just replace the Posi-Pin, which costs about a buck.
“It’s been the best improvement we’ve made to the machine in a long, long time,” said Sailrite Vice President Matt Grant, one of the company owners.
It’s also an example of the innovation that Columbia City-based Sailrite has made to a hallmark of its operations. Grant calls it “progressive improvement.” Others in manufacturing call it “continuing improvement.”
“We look at what we’ve produced and look at our support of the sewing machines and how customers are using the machines, and we’re trying to figure out ways to make the machines better and more user-friendly and more durable,” Grant said.
That means Sailrite is never actually done developing a product. The company’s workers and testers are always looking for a better way to do things.
TWI Institute, a consulting firm for manufacturers, describes continuous improvement as the “act of taking an established process, breaking it down to its component parts, building it back up using only the essential parts and committing to making incremental improvements over time.”
It refers to the process of making products. But it also can refer to improvement to the product itself.
The idea is based on the Japanese concept of kaizen—which comes from kai, a Japanese word for breaking apart a process, and zen, for making things better. Together, the word refers to the idea that small, ongoing positive changes can lead to significant improvements.
Kaizen is at the root of lean manufacturing, a process that focuses on eliminating non-value-added materials and processes and streamlining value-added processes.
Consultants and universities—including the Purdue University Manufacturing Extension Partnership—work with companies large and small to implement lean and continuous improvement strategies.
At Sailrite, the process is less formal and focused in large part on the actual products.
In addition to sewing machines, Sailrite sells hand, power and air tools for working with fabrics, foam and leather. And it offers foam, pillows, hardware, leather and fabrics. To help customers understand how to use the products, the company has a team constantly developing new projects and creating video tutorials, all the while working with Sailrite’s tools and materials.
Along the way, team members see what’s working and what’s not.
Grant, for example, is frustrated by the grommet tools currently on the market. Sailrite sells grommets, which its customers add to canvas for canopies, tents, sails, bags and other projects. But Grant isn’t happy with the operation of existing grommet presses, which are used to crimp a top and bottom piece together, sandwiching the edges of a hole in fabric so it doesn’t tear while in use.
So he’s spent two years developing a new kind of press. It’s in the final design-and-testing phase and should be available by the end of the year.
The company has also been working on new ways to print large-scale patterns directly onto fabrics to help customers more easily cut and sew projects.
Many of the improvements happen over time—and some take months or years to develop.
That’s the case for the Posi-Pin, which was part of Sailrite’s original patented design. But it took years to get it right.
The first pin was made out of stainless steel, but Grant said the company couldn’t get the pin’s break point to be consistent enough. So workers researched and tested several other materials, to no avail.
Eventually, they found a company in the United States that specialized in using very small amounts of composite materials to create products with extremely precise breaking points.
“So it’s weaker than the metal pin and it religiously breaks at the right point,” Grant said. “And when a pin breaks, you throw it away, you pop a new one in.”
That’s a big deal to Sailrite customers, most of whom buy a Sailrite machine specifically to sew heavy-duty fabrics. Customers used to get frustrated when their machines jammed, and they were stuck either trying to realign them or paying for expensive repairs, Grant said. Now, Ultrafeed Sewing Machines come with a handful of pins, and owners can order a pack of 10 replacements for $10.80.
The change immediately cut Sailrite’s customer-support cases in half.
“Best thing since sliced bread,” one customer, whose name is published as Flip, wrote in the reviews of the replacement Posi-Pin.
That’s what Grant likes to hear.
“The last thing we want to be doing is providing technical support to a sewing machine,” he said. “We want to be telling somebody how to use the equipment, not fix it.”•
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