Loop Pile NK02 Tufting Gun: Troubleshooting for needle support touching the foot

You never want your needle or the supporting part of your needle to touch the foot! 
Don’t turn on the gun if you do not have a gap small gap between foot and needle support part.
You should always have the little gap shown in the picture between needle support and foot!

If you can’t turn the gear of your tufting gun easily all the way, but your needle support is not touching the foot, don’t turn your gun on and follow this link.

Really, don’t it on. Not even if you centered it so nicely that it would slip through.

(nice centering job tho) 

This is also what causes your gun to run unsmoothly because it’s basically trying to bend your foot like shown in the picture.
Of course you can just bend it back in place, but also it’s made of metal and will break it you do it too many times. 

Also your motor and gear will take some longterm damage. Your tufting gun will most likely not break at this very point, but it’s a heavy force bumping against the metal foot. And even though it will bend it’s very likely that this will cause some damage to the gun and decrease the longevity.

Bend the foot of the tufting gun back to it’s original position and move it a bit forward.
Your foot needs to go more forward to make sure there is a nice small gap between supporting part and foot. 

In case you don’t have the correct distance between pusher and foot after you fixed the problem, you want to follow the steps in the uneven weave troubleshoot post to adjust your foot correctly

Keep going, it’s tricky to see through logic behind all the connected parts when adjusting the pile height in the beginning, but once you did it a few times it will click and you do it from memory without any problems.