Driving me to brew alcohol to drink, that is. I’ve been planning a homebrewing session for a while now, but it keeps getting delayed. Today I got the ingredients for a batch of mead and a batch of beer, so I’ll be brewing at least one of those tomorrow (probably the beer). The beer’s a Scotch ale – yum, malty drinks are delicious! – and the mead will be a basic sweet mead. Partial mash for the beer and a non-boil batch of mead (using campden tablets instead).
The set of orange strippers for my Passap arrived today, and I just tried a swatch. It turns out that my Duomatic 80 manual was incomplete, so I was wrong about the manual not including cast on instructions. Now that I have a complete one (the wonders of PDF!), I have a list of cast on methods. They’re still pretty sparse, but they tell the needle arrangement, lock settings, and which color strippers are supposed to be used. I’d found some instructions yesterday which didn’t specify stripper color, so they weren’t too helpful.
Anyway, I tried the tubular cast on first, and it didn’t work at all. The first row went smoothly, but at the start of the second row, the lock jammed and I had to start over. I used the recommended tension and stitch settings for the yarn weight (fingering), so I don’t think there was anything wrong there. Followed the needle arrangement rule, too. I can only guess that I had some other setting wrong, but God knows what.
After that, I tried the double-bed racking cast on (I guess that’s what it’s called). I had some difficulty getting the lock to slide easily over the needles, but this time the lock didn’t jam on the second row. Success! I’ll have to play around with it a lot more to really understand the relationship of stitch settings to yarn weight, but I’m just happy that I finally produced some knitting with this machine.
And that calls for a drink!
dancingbarefoot 
I can’t help it – the teacher comes out in me….What weight yarn are you using? and what size stitch? Also, are you using weights? They really help with tubular cast on. But – start with double bed stuff until you get the feel the your machine, it’s easier.
The yarn’s fingering weight and I don’t recall the stitch size off the top of my head. It was whatever the manual specified. No weights because the manual didn’t say anything about them, and to be honest, I wouldn’t have any idea where to hang them on a Passap. I know where they go on a Japanese machine – the cast-on comb – but where would they even fit on a Passap?