Review: Sew Ready Amiga 500 Cover

With my wife running a candle business called Appleyard Candles I am a firm believer in supporting small local businesses. I recently purchased a cover for my Amiga 500 from a small local company called Sew Ready and decided to do a quick review of it to help support them.

Before I get into the review, first a disclosure. I paid for this item myself and was under no incentive to write this review. Sew Ready were not aware that I was going to review this item on my blog prior to publishing it.

Discovering Sew Ready

I am a member of the Norwich Amiga Group and during Covid times the community is mostly active on Facebook. Graham, the admin of the group, posted about a CD32 cover he had received. He was very happy about it and the quality looked very good. It was made by Sew Ready, a company setup by Małgorzata Bartosiewicz-Kucharuk who is dedicated to creating high quality covers for your retro devices.

At time of writing there were covers for all sorts of Atari, Amstrad, Commodore and Sinclair machines and the list is growing rapidly. I enquired on the post about covers for other Amigas such as the 500 and 1200 and she was working on producing them. She even mentioned that she could work on a bespoke cover for my BBC Master 128!

Earlier this week she had finished work on an Amiga 500 design, which is great as I really need a cover for my machines. Not only for dust purposes, but also because my cat loves hanging out on my desk. I immediately purchased one.

Preparation

My Amiga 500 had a Gotek inside it with a large display module mounted on top. This would definitely get in the way of the cover. Now that I have an SD card hard drive mounted on the top I use the Gotek a lot less. I also have an external Gotek if I really need one. So I cleaned up and re-greased a spare old floppy drive I had and installed this into the Amiga instead.

The Cover

The cover itself came boxed and included some care & washing instructions. Which I thought was a very nice touch. The cover itself is made from a soft, high quality, canvas type material.

The fit is perfect. It isn’t just some piece of cloth or plastic loosely laying on top, it is a tight fit but not too tight. It is almost as if the fabric was somehow moulded to the machine. It isn’t going to fall off if you move the machine after fitting the cover. And move the machine I did, after fitting the cover I slid it to the back.

It is clear that these covers are created by someone who really has a passion for what they do and really has a love for retro hardware. As a Linux developer I’ve grown up with the philosophy of “Do One Thing And Do It Well.”, Sew Ready fits this philosophy very well.

The back of the cover has been shaped in such a way that it assists with the tight fit, but you can still keep everything plugged in.

Summary

I knew from previous conversations that the cover was good quality and made with not only love of the craft, but love of retro hardware. But it exceeded my expectations. There isn’t really anything negative to say. Maybe a range of colours would be cool? But the colour choices for all their covers are already excellent. The prices are under what I would expect to pay for this quality. I will definitely be purchasing more Sew Ready covers for my growing hardware collection.