In response to public demand (two requests for this in the same week is “public demand” as far as I’m concerned), here’s how to lower and subsequently raise the feed dogs on a 201.  What follows applies to both the Mk1 and the Mk2, and hopefully it’ll be a bit easier to follow than the original machine instructions are.

OK then, let’s do this thing.  You need to swing your machine head up on its hinges, and maybe hold it there with something or other while you furtle about underneath the bed.   When you’ve done this dogs-dropping lark the once, the next time won’t take you two shakes of a lamb’s tail so you won’t need to bother propping it up.

What you’re looking for is this gubbins, which is located just under the front edge of the bed, three inches or so in from the left …

Now, when you want to lower the dogs for embroidery or whatever, the first thing you do is unscrew that knurled screw head, so it looks like this …

The screw might be tight, in which case you can either get a pair of pliers on it or use a wide-bladed screwdriver in the slot in the screw head.  Don’t forget that you want to turn it anti-clockwise!  In theory it will unscrew about as far as in that snap and no more, but on some machines you’ll find that it will unscrew completely and drop out.  Don’t panic if it does – just screw it back in a turn or so.

That’s what it looks like from a different angle, and perhaps you can just see the threaded hole into which that screw was screwed.  Now that’s unscrewed, the wossname with the threaded holes in it and that little arm sticking up is free to pivot downwards, so your next move is to push downwards on the arm, so that the other threaded hole lines up with the screw, as in the following picture …

By swinging that wossname down, you’ve rearranged the linkage so that feed dogs are dropped and they no longer move the work past the needle, and if we look at it square on, the whole thing now looks like this …

And when you screw the screw back in (fairly tight) so as to lock it all in that posiiton, it looks like in the picture below.

That is the “dropped dogs” setting, and you’re done, so you can lower the head back down into its base now and embroider (or indeed darn) away to your heart’s content.  And here for comparison is the same picture but with the normal setting.

Finally, just in case you haven’t realised, the easy way to remember this is that you drop the little arm down to drop your feed dogs.