Necessity drives a lot of things

When I had problems with my Janome a few weeks ago it was a seemingly pretty simple fix. It was filled with lint and that impeded the feed dogs. But I'm now faced with an annoying foible of this machine that sometimes the feed dogs will not come back up and sometimes I need to go through the whole rigmarole of opening it up and inspecting it all (that's means wiggle a lot of stuff). But twice now that hasn't done the trick. The dogs do return but its on their own schedule. It is around 10 years old. That's not old.

If money was snow I'd replace the machine in an instance....... BUT I like it.
My hubby bought a can of pressurized air for cleaning computers so that's my next strategy.
But this has been costing me time. I haven't begun something new because of the dog issue. (Mind you it pushed me to finish a few things.)

But the short of it all is I'm hesitant to lower those dogs. Free motion work is all done with no dogs in play. Yes I could cover them with a piece of plastic, (Plan C) but its not come to that.
I DO have another machine a Juki which does beautiful free motion work except it doesn't have a  means to fix the stitching speed. (Bummer). (That's Plan D)

So the Janome for sewing? and zigzag (Satin stitching) and the Juki for free motion. Sounds nice.
But my space IS limited and my sewing table too small for two machines. 55" x 24"

A quick inspection of the local thrift store turned up this beautiful, shamefully inexpensive maple table. 55" x 32" Same foot print but 8' wider. this allows me to place a machine at either end. It actually gives me more light as well as my back is no longer to the room's lighting. I placed an old mirror on the back wall to help bring in more light and now I think I'm away to races again.

I do love my Janome but the waiting times for service are up to 2 weeks in my area and you can never get out for under $100. We'll see if two dedicated machines drive me nuts or save my bacon.