ISMACS Needle List

 Sewing Machine Needles and their Equivalents

This is a compilation of nearly six thousand machines and their needles as published by needle suppliers and manufacturers and drawn from catalogs published by Beka (Belgium), Free, Brewer, Blelock, Brysons, Boye, Diamond, H.B.Goodrich, Hart, Lammertz (Germany), Muva (Holland), Schmetz (Germany), Singer, Torrington and Wheeler & Wilson, plus the Interchangeable Needle List from the Smithsonian (the most complete and accurate ever published).

Finding the correct needle for a very old machine can be difficult. Some of the earlier needle classes are long obsolete (though they do appear occasionally on eBay and specialist websites) and scarcity has made even the fairly recently popular 20x1 needle quite expensive. Fortunately, there are equivalents for most of them.

Needle suppliers each had their own classification system, often resulting in several alternatives for each machine. This lists attempts to tabulate all of them.

There are duplications; sometimes through confusing abbreviations or poor spelling in catalogs, sometimes to facilitate simpler searching and to resolve ambiguities.

Every effort has been made to ensure the data was copied faithfully and, therefore, any mistakes in the originals may have survived. This is only a guide and no responsibility can be accepted for misinformation. When experimenting with a new needle, try getting it to make one stitch first; then two or three while turning the machine by hand, before trying to sew with it.

• ISMACS Needle List
• PDF - 4-9-2010 (~2.5mb)

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