How To Clean Your Serger

September 2, 2021

I don’t know about you but I find my serger gets so linty, so quickly! Especially if I’m using a fabric which creates a lot of lint like a sweatshirt knit or french terry. My quick clean includes using my brush and chamois to do a surface clean around the outside and the lint tray but between projects (or every other project!) I like to do a deep clean of my machine.

You will need:

A cleaning brush, I have a double ended one with a soft bristled flat brush and the other side is a round brush.

A chamois cloth or soft cloth

A mini screwdriver

*Optional: Mini vacuum! I actually don’t own one of these but I can imagine these to be so handy at extracting that last bit of lint from your machine!

I use a TEXI cleaning kit which includes oil for your machine and canned air for blowing away those final loose pieces of lint. If you’ve joined my course Simple Serging you will know that I generally don’t use canned air as I find it blows the lint around the room, but if you do decide to use it just make sure you’ve deep cleaned your Serger using a brush beforehand.

Make sure your machine is turned off throughout the whole cleaning process!

Cleaning the lower loopers:

We are going to start off by cleaning all of the lint out that has gathered in our lower loopers. To do this, I’m just going to open up the cover and clean it out. For my lighter cleans, I don’t generally unthread my machine but for my deep cleans I do, by just snipping at my threads, lifting the needle, and pulling the threads out of the machine.

Next, I open up the looper cover, and my machine actually opens out a little bit more to the left so I just open it all out all of the way!

Taking our soft brush, we’re just going to gently begin brushing away the lint from top to bottom – there is no need to use too much pressure for this. I also go in with my round head brush to get into those little nooks and crannies which are a little harder to reach.

You can do the same on the left side where the blade is, slowly brushing all the lint out onto the table.

Once you have got all the lint out onto your table, I just wipe it away with my chamois. Whilst I don’t have my threads in, I also take my chamois and give a good clean over the top of the machine around the tension disks to get any dust which has gathered on the outside of the machine.

Cleaning under the throat plate:

So I’ll start off by closing my machine back up, and taking my large screwdriver and unscrewing our throat plate. Every machine is slightly different in this area – for mine I have to first remove my seam allowance guide. My throat plate is separated into two parts – I have a front throat plate and a back throat plate, so I’ll start off by just removing the screws on the front throat plate and popping off the cover. Disconnect the presser foot. Go in again with the brush, tapping away the lint, and making sure to get rid of any excess lint on the throat plate.

Reattach the throat using the screws and screwdriver and give the presser foot a clean before reattaching.

Cleaning under the tension disks:

So not all machines have the option to remove the tension discs – if yours doesn’t it’s probably best to just leave it for the yearly service, but if yours does then they are very simple to remove.

So we will just take our screwdriver and remove the screws – each tension disc has its own cover so you can just remove it and give the underneath a good clean with your cleaning brush and then reattach the cover! You may not need to clean this area if you have not been using fabric that creates a lot of lint, or you have been keeping your machine covered when it is not in use!