Where to buy and sell knitting machines in the UK

If you’re looking to buy or sell a knitting machine here are some great places to look.

I’m George from Knit Works London. We’re machine knitting specialists, and we’re often asked if we buy or sell knitting machines. We sell an amazing range of yarns for machine knitting, teach classes, and hire out machines, but we don’t buy or sell them.

So here are our recommendations. Firstly the types of machines.

A flatbed domestic knitting machines is a portable knitting machine, often used at home. This is the best kind of machine for most people from beginners up to professional designers. They’re affordable second hand and you can produce amazing fabrics, garments and accessories with them.

We personally prefer the Brother machines as we find them more robust compared to the other brands, but they also offer more scope for techniques and creativity. These aren’t made any more so you’ll need to get them second hand. But, there’s a strong market for them.

We’d recommend models from the KH800 series. So KH830, 836 and so on. These are the 24 needle repeat punchcard machines. We use the Brother KH881 model for our classes. This was the most numerous and popular model. And we have them available to hire.

You can find details of the spec of each model on the machine4u.co.uk website. The later KH900 series went digital, but that’s 30 year old electronincs that’s now less reliable, and you need to learn old software to do what you can do with a simple punchcard on the older machines.

You can usually find Brother knitting machines on eBay, but if you do, make sure that the machine comes from a good home and that it’s been recently serviced. Check it has a new sponge bar as that’s the most common problem. You will get your best deals on eBay but is always a risk that there’s some damage or missing pieces.

If you’ve got a machine that needs some work, check out our video about where to get your machine repaired and services.

An alternative place to buy machines is a Facebook group called Knitting Machine Sales UK.

People are buying and selling machines and equipment there, and there are some dealers active there also.

There are some online shops, Andee Knits, that’s www.andeeknits.co.uk, is a good one. 
You can also buy Silverreed knitting machines new. SilverViscount.co.uk is a good online shop for these. It’s not our preferred type of machine but if buying new is important to you, that’s your only option.

You can also buy circular knitting machines in numerous places. They might be a gateway into machine knitting but you can’t do any techniques on them beyond plain knitting, and for the price, you might as well get a good second hand flat bed machine, which you’d be able to do so much more with.

Industrial knitting machines were used commercially to produce knitwear, before mass production went digital. We prefer Dubied, and the industrials available to hire at Knit Works London are all Dubieds in gauges 2.5 to 12, so anything from Aran up to T-shirt weight.

These are old and getting rarer. Dealers in the UK include www.tortex.co.uk, and www.knittingmachineservices.com.

There are also digital production machines like Shima and Stoll, but these are more for professional use.

So hopefully that’s useful! And if you want to learn how to use your new knitting machine – check out the courses at https://www.knitworkslondon.com/ and sign up to the newsletter there for updates.