Brother 395X and similar knitting machines
The type of machine I have never looked indepth with are the plastic brigade and looking online recently I was surprised to see the prices of these at a shocking level. I thought I would check my stash of plastics, rarely ever sought after by me but most came as a package that is apart from one – the Bond Classic and I thank this machine for giving me the impetus to start machine knitting again after many years of not even thinking about them. The other plastic machines I have are the Knitmaster Hobby and a Singer Big Nine. Both Knitmasters have a fine selection of books to help with the process but spare needles are unavailable as far as I can see. A description of all these machines is given on my website.
The Bond I bought new and proceeded to knit up a few things, and that got me into spinning my own yarn, this came about after a holiday in the Lake District, I took a course to find out how to do this and bought a spinning wheel along with all of the necessary gear. Living in Scotland, fleeces were reasonably easy to attain so I produced a few ounces of home spun every now and then plus all the other bits of various yarns I had bought along with the spinning wheel. The Bond handles this admirably.
The machine that started this latest thought process was the prices of the plastic Brother convertible, When I first tried out he KXS390 it was a smooth going machine but in my opinion, pretty basic. I can never understand why one would pay the amount of money I see on Ebay and Facebook etc for this machine but that's life. To add to that I have the Zippy 90 and again a smart wee machine but again so basic. I must note that I can find no spares needles for any of these machines .
I have Brother KX395, Brother KX350,Singer LK100, Silver Reed LK150. You can use the same needles as Silver Reed LK150 to all of them and also the spongestrip. I also have Bond ISM, but the needles to that machine is diffrent.