Category Archives: Vintage Singer sewing machines

Sep1

Singer 66 and Singer 99 slide plate – how to remove and replace it

Posted on 01/09/2011 by Sid

The slide plate is the chromed steel plate which slides open to reveal the bobbin in its carrier. Some folk call it the bobbin plate but it’s not – it’s the slide plate, and judging by the number of vintage Singers out there without one, a lot of people force it off, can’t get it back on, and lose it. Here’s how not to do the same thing yourself.

For starters, let’s see how to remove it, and in the process, discover why you can’t (or at least shouldn’t be able to) slide it right off …

There’s the slide plate slid open a bit, in the same way that you’d slide it open to change your bobbin. To take the slide plate off, you need first of all to turn the machine’s handwheel towards you until the needle is at its highest point. Then, lift the end of the plate which is nearest the needle up a bit (like 3mm or 1/8th inch) against the pressure of a spring which you can’t see. This works best if you only open the slide plate 1cm or so like in that picture, but the main point to watch is that you don’t pull it up any higher than you see in the picture below. All you’re aiming to do is slide the plate over the other one.

There’s actually a bit of Photoshoppery in the picture above because in reality, the plate will only stay like that with your finger holding it up. Anyhow, it’s this next stage which sounds a bit of a faff (or if you’re German, a pfaff) but it isn’t really. Actually doing it is not complicated at all.

Having lifted the end of the plate up a bit, you now need to keep it raised while with your other hand you push the plate towards the needle. What you want is for the slide plate to ride up, first over the other plate (the needle plate), then as you keep pushing it along, over the first feed dog it comes to, like this …

While you have the plate in that position, the other end of it will look just like in the picture below.

And there you finally see what holds the slide plate in! Yep, it’s that double-ended spring. See how the two grooves in the underneath of the slide plate fit over the ends of the spring? No? OK then, just for you …

Now you’ve seen that and you understand how it fits in, it won’t come as any surprise at all to find that if you push the slide plate just another 3mm or so towards the needle, the back end of it clears the spring …

Et voilà – you’ve successfully removed the slide plate of a Singer 99 (or indeed a 66 ‘cos it’s just the same)!

And at this point I should have taken another snap to illustrate why when you slide open the slide plate normally, you can’t slide if off the end of the machine. But I forgot to. No biggie though – if you turn your slide plate over, you’ll see the reason. That’s right – those grooves which fit over the ends of the spring don’t go all the way along the underneath of the plate, which is why you have to take it off the other way like you just did.

Replacing the slide plate is easy. Drop it in place (the right way round) with the end nearest the needle over the feed dogs, and line up the grooves in the other end with the ends of the spring, like this …

then wiggle it over the spring ends like this …

and then keep pushing towards the end of the machine until it drops into place. Job done!

Finally, a Dire Warning. Here’s a picture of the magic spring with that arm thingy swung out of the way so you can clearly see the screw which holds it in place …

Judging by the size of that screw head, you would think that it’s on the end of a fairly normal kind of a screw. But it is not. Oh no. Not at all. That screw is a really skinny little thing, which is very easily snapped off by the over-enthusiastic application of a screwdriver. When it snaps, it can be a real PITA to extract in order to replace it so that the spring is held in place and your slide plate will stay put.

If that spring is loose on your machine, take it very easy indeed when tightening that screw …

Aug30

Vintage Singer 99 handcrank – times two!

Posted on 30/08/2011 by Sid

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On Saturday I bought two more machines – a 99K handcrank from a lady in a bungalow in Kent, and a 99K handcrank from a lady in a bungalow in Surrey.

Both machines turned out to be from the same production run of 35,000 Model 99’s, which was commissioned at the Kilbowie factory in Scotland in June 1938.

I wonder what the odds are on me picking up two machines from that one batch on the same day 73 years later, and then finding that out of 35,000 identical machines numbered from 854677 to 889676, we have two here with serial numbers which are only 197 apart …

Aug26

The joy of Ebay #1

Posted on 26/08/2011 by Sid

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Mentioning bobbings and neddles in that last post has reminded me to share with you a couple of other little gems which I spotted recently on Ebay.

First off, a listing with a bog-standard 1930’s Singer 99 described as a “vintage sewing machine which is very heavy because it is made from thick black plastic with gold details.” Oh yes, that vintage plastic is so much heavier than this cheap plastic you get nowadays. And did you know that a magnet doesn’t stick to modern plastic like it does to this good old stuff?

Better still though was a listing which stopped me in my tracks. Never before had I seen a sewing machine on Ebay with a starting price of £300 and a Buy It Now price of £500. So what, you wonder, was up for auction? Some ancient machine, perhaps one with a faded sticky label underneath upon which is written “I made this one myself” and below that the signature of Isaac Singer himself? Some never-before-seen prototype from the Singer factory in Podolsk? A pristine example of the very rare steam-powered Model 13 from 1911 complete with the original gusset-grauncher and other attachments?

Ermmm … no. What it said in the description was “sewing machine and table circa 1903”, followed by details of its condition and serial number. That was below a picture of a common-or-garden Singer 185 on the usual table (what I’m fairly sure is called a “combination table”).

Now, I find it difficult to understand how anybody might think that a modern-looking machine like a 185 could have been made in 1903, but I find many other things difficult to understand too. So, being a helpful sort of a bloke, I sent the seller a message which just said “You might like to know that the machine in your picture was first made in 1958 and the table is also 1950’s”. This prompted a reply to the effect that the seller had looked up the serial number on the Singer site and it was definitely 1903, so there.

Fair enough. I left it at that, but I did notice that the listing re-appeared in due course with a start price of £20, a Buy It Now of £100 and the description changed to “circa 1950’s”. Not surprisingly, it still didn’t sell.

It’s interesting how many Singer sewing machines you see listed on Ebay which were made in 1903. Except they weren’t made in 1903. If you go to the Singer site and look up serial numbers with a K prefix, it does indeed say 1903. But, as is obvious to most people, that means a machine serial number starting with a K. It doesn’t mean a motor serial number starting with a K, which practically all UK ones do and always have …

Aug24

Bobbins for vintage Singers

Posted on 24/08/2011 by Sid

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Or as is often included with a sewing machine for sale on Ebay, bobbings. If you’re lucky there’s sometimes a packet of neddles with it too, but anyhow …

First off, here’s a snap of a bobbin and shuttle out of a 28K. This is of course the Vibrating Shuttle that doesn’t, and this particular one is in the state most of them tend to be found in unless Granny looked after her machine really well and it’s been kept dry ever since she turned her toes up. There’s only one Singer long bobbin (as it is known), you can still get them from Singer, and they will fit any Singer Vibrating Shuttle machine.

Round bobbins are a different matter, and the first one we need to consider is this horrible thing …

Now a plastic bobbin is all very well in your modern machine with a plastic bobbin-carrier, but it has no business in a vintage Singer. None whatsoever. Not even if it does fit on the bobbin-winder. You can get into your feng shui as much as you like, but believe me you’ll never up your positive qi if you put one of these in your lovely old 99. Not a chance. Guaranteed to put your chakras out of alignment too if you ask me. In fact, all things considered, the best thing you can do with any nasty plastic bobbins you find is to donate them to Auntie Sandra so she can use them in her nasty plastic Singer Touch ‘n’ Tangle.

No, what you want is proper bobbins, made of metal, like these …

Having said that, though, you only want the one on the left if you have a 221 or 222 Featherweight or a 301.

And if you have a Singer Model 15 of any flavour it’s the one in the midlle you want, although as far as I know, the 15 bobbin also fits stuff we don’t get into here such as the 223, 227, 228 and 237.

It’s the one on the right we’re interested in, and that one is properly known as the Metal Singer 66 Bobbin. It fits the 66, the 99 and the 201 which are the ones that Elsie and I mainly interested in, though I do have a weakness for a nice 185 and it fits those too. Actually it fits a whole heap of other machines as well such as the 285 and the 401, but that’s uncharted territory as far as I’m concerned.

OK so far? Right. So if, as is often the case, you have an assortment of bobbins which look like the two on the right, how do you tell which one is the kosher article for a 66, 99 or 201? It’s a doddle. You look at ’em side-on …

The one in the middle is the one for the 15’s, and it is flat. Yes, I know there’s a raised lip round the hole up the middle, but the top itself is flat. So is the bottom. Except there is no bottom, because a bobbin is eitherwayuppable. Check out the one on the right and there’s your answer – if the bobbin is slightly domed like that, it’s a 66 bobbin, whether it has holes in it or not. That’s the one you want for a 66, 99 or 201. I told you it was easy. However, we’re not quite done yet because you need to be aware of one final thing.

Beware of metal 66 bobbins bought new off the internets. Some factory out east has churned out gazillions of nice shiny 66 bobbins recently which apparently work perfectly well with machines built from the 1960’s on, but not with a vintage machine. They are No Use. You know when you put a bobbin on the winder there’s a little sticky-outy thing which goes in the small hole in the side of the bobbin and if it doesn’t, the shaft turns but your bobbin stays put? Well, on this particular (anonymous) make of new 66 bobbin, the hole’s in the wrong place. And the only sure-fire way to tell if they’ll work with your vintage machine is to actually try one on the bobbin-winder …

Aug22

The most toys

Posted on 22/08/2011 by Sid

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Obviously I don’t know any better than you do who actually has the most toys, but I do know that at this morning’s count we had 24 vintage Singer sewing machines scattered around the house. I also know that the 4 which are on the kitchen table need to be off it PDQ, or we shall be eating off plates on our knees later on.

So, you ask, what prompted that particular line of thought about the most toys? Well, Elsie found my Festival Hat this morning, still with a few badges on it. He’s a snap of one side of it, modelled by Stoner …

Aug20

Cabinets and treadle bases for vintage Singer sewing machines

Posted on 20/08/2011 by Sid

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I really do need to do a whole heap of stuff about cabinets and treadle bases for vintage Singers, but apart from not having the time right now to do it in depth, the big problem I have is making space to take pictures of the ones we have here. Cleo, Elsie’s 1900 27K treadle, lives right under the window which makes photographing it a bit tricky, and we’d have to move her 1909 66K treadle and rearrange half The Sewing Room to get a halfway-decent shot or two of that. There’s also the nice Number 46 cabinet in there with Elsie’s 201K/2 in it waiting for me to reassemble the treadle mechanism in it, and come to think of it, that’s actually going to be photographable once I’ve done that. So there is hope.

Then there’s the convertible treadle base which has moved in behind the kitchen door and is quietly waiting for us to work out what to do about the polyurethane varnish some muppet coated the top of it with. It’s a shame they did that, and it’s even more of a shame they didn’t clean the top up before they slapped the horrible stuff on. But the base is a bit special, so it’ll be worth it.

The Number 46 cabinet which is currently serving as a kind of extension to the kitchen table has been there so long now that Elsie will have to remind me what we decided we were going to do with it, and I won’t even mention the 1950’s Singer worktable which followed me home from Essex with a 99 in it and lives in the bathroom now because (a) Elsie doesn’t really like it and (b) there’s nowhere else for it to go even if she did.

Anyhow … here, courtesy of a 1930 Singer catalogue is your common or garden Granny’s treadle base, which is properly called a Cabinet Table, into which you can fit any full size Singer made before the free-arms that came in around 1965. As far as we’re concerned here, that means a 27, a 127, a 66 or a 201. Or a 15 if that’s what you’re into.

In case you’re wondering where the fifth drawer is, it’s a long wide one which tilts down across the front. It’s that plain section of front without a knob in the picture above, below where the machine sits. There were several variations on this theme, all with the wide centre drawer, but with either one, two or three drawers each side, the latter being the least common nowadays.

The Victorian and early Edwardian bases shared the same cast ironwork, but instead of folding the machine down into the table top and swinging the flap over the hole like in the one above, you disappear the machine on an early treadle by hiding it under a wooden box-type lid which locks down into place (or more usually doesn’t nowadays because nobody’s seen the key since that big party on Armistice Day 1918). That type’s referred to as a Coffin Top unless you’re in the US of A, in which case it’s a Casket Top.

I’m not exactly sure when the cast-iron legs were finally dropped, but the replacement used exactly the same top and similar treadle ironwork, with the iron legs replaced by relatively plain wooden ones which don’t look as “Granny” but are a heck of a sight easier to keep free of cobwebs.

Elsie’s got one iron-legs and one wooden-legs treadle table in The Sewing Room, and we’ll come back to those once I’ve taken some snaps of them. We’ll also look at the usual vintage enclosed cabinets. Judging by the number of them that keep cropping up on Ebay in a terrible state, every house in the north-west must have had one in the front room between the wars with a 201 in it.

Talking of front rooms, the one Singer cabinet we don’t have but really want is the Drawing Room Cabinet Number 21. They’re not quite as rare as hens’ teeth, but one in very condition is, and to complicate matters, most of the nice-looking ones seem to be in either Cheshire or Welsh Wales. But we’re determined to track one down. Many folk think they’re hideous, but we think they’re wonderful, and if you also think that the frontage of St Pancras Station is lovely, you will too.

Here’s an awful video of a lovely example of a what we call a Drawing Room Cabinet but some folks call a Parlor Cabinet, which I thought was a different one, but either way it’s a #21. Whatever, if you’re prone to vertigo or to motion sickness, grab a couple of Kwells now. There’s no commentary on it, and in case you’re wondering, the machine’s a 66K with Lotus decals.

Aug18

“Your Singer needs new brushes, madam”

Posted on 18/08/2011 by Sid

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Or “It’s yer brushes, lady”, depending on how thick the carpet is in the shop. If there is one.

But what does it mean? Well, first off we need to know what brushes are. They are bits of carbon on the end of little springs, and here’s a picture of two pairs of brushes from vintage Singer motors. The top pair are more or less new, and the bottom pair are past their best before.

The motor on your vintage Singer has two of those brushes, and their purpose is to conduct electricty from wires which don’t move to a bit of the motor which does, in order that the motor might turn and drive your sewing machine. That particular moving bit of the motor is called the commutator, it’s a kind of rotary switch made of copper segments, and it lives on one end of a shaft at the other end of which is the little pulley with your drive belt on it. Those springs push the carbon against the commutator, which is whizzing round at a fair old rate when you step on the go-faster pedal, so not surprisingly the carbon very slowly wears away.

How it works in practice is that the brush itself and its spring live in a square brass tube with a closed end against which the spring presses, and that fits in the motor like this …

It’s held in place by that curved bit of phosphor bronze, to bottom end of which is soldered that wire with the hairy insulation on it, which as far as we’re concerned here goes to your foot pedal. That’s how your expensive electricity gets from there to the rotating commutator, which is that copper-coloured segmented thingy under the end of the brush.

It’s a bit of a pig to photograph clearly, so here’s a slightly different view at no extra charge …

So now you know far more about Singer motor brushes than most people do, and if you run a vintage Singer electric, sooner or later this new-found knowledge will come in handy. How so? Well, when one day you notice that your machine is making a funny metallic noise and your investigations confirm that it’s coming from the motor, you won’t need me to tell you that it’s yer brushes. They have worn out, and if you keep trying to run your machine like that you will do it No Good At All.

New brushes are readily available online at £3.50 or so a pair including p ‘n’ p, and it’s not a big job to change them. So, you ask, is it a DIY job then? Well, if you’re possessed of an ordinary screwdriver, common sense, patience and an affinity for things like this, I can’t see any reason why not. If you look at the back end of the motor, you’ll see at the top and at the bottom a screw head hiding down a hole. Undo the top one, take it out and you’ll see that a section of the casing lifts off, revealing exactly the view in those pictures above.

What you need to do is ease that square brass holder out, taking care not to let the brush and spring drop into the innards of the motor. Having successfully extracted the brass thingy and removed the spring and dead bush, take a Q-tip, soak it in lighter fuel, meths, vodka or even WD-40, stuff it up the open end, pull it out and marvel at the amount of carbon dust that was in there. Repeat as necessary, but it doesn’t have to be clinically clean. Then insert your nice shiny new brush and spring into the brass thingy, and reassemble right way round. Which, though not difficult, is admittedly easier said than done the first time you try.

But fear not, because if you screw up, you have these pictures to refer to, and you also have a real life example of the correct assembly.

Oh yes you do.

You haven’t touched the bottom one yet and that’s identical …

Aug16

Vintage Singer sewing machine attachments

Posted on 16/08/2011 by Sid

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Lots of them, ranging from boxed sets of attachments as supplied with most pre-1965 Singer machines through to Singer buttonholers and Singer-fit buttonholers. Zigzaggers too. Some in better condition than others, but none of them rusty and all of them well usable for their intended purpose. And that’s just the ones in boxes. There’s also a 2-litre icecream tub somewhere in The Sewing Room which is full of individual attachments in ziplock bags …

And they’re all waiting for Elsie to have a sort-out, so we know what stays in our collection and what we can let go.

But right now there’s the pears to pick and get ripening before we bottle ’em, the brambles to pick, and the last of the damson jam to make. The first of the sweetcorn’s not far off, there’s garlic to harvest and beans to pick for drying, as well as the rest of the spuds to dig up. I’ve got a wayward rose hip bush to demolish and some major organising of log piles to do before much longer too, so I can get some more sawn up and stacked under cover. Then before we know it, it’ll be time to pick the apples, and I really should think about finishing off the decorating of the bathroom which sort of got put on hold at Easter. Or maybe it was in February …

All things considered, I really can’t see the Great Attachment Sort-Out happening any time soon, so until it does, if you’re after any attachments for a vintage Singer sewing machine, just drop an email to sidandelsie @ btinternet.com without the spaces and we’ll happily help you out if we can.

Aug15

Singer knee lever sewing machines

Posted on 15/08/2011 by Sid

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Typical! We’ve had a knee-lever Singer 99K lurking in a corner of Elsie’s sewing room for ages, and today we sold it. And no sooner had I closed the front door behind the proud purchaser than I realised I hadn’t taken any pictures of it set up ready to sew or of the inner workings! So here’s a brief explanation of the knee-lever controller, minus some snaps which really would have been a big help. But I’m sure we’ll manage somehow.

OK, check out that page from the 1930 US Singer catalogue, which shows a knee-lever 99K all plugged into that cute wall light fitting and rarin’ to go. Now take a squint at this picture, which is of the 99 we sold today, sitting quietly on our kitchen table with its awesome 1960’s plastic tablecloth which stops sewing machine oil soaking into the wood …

Notice how it looks much like any other early 99K – until you spot that hole to the right of the base. That’s the magic hole into which you insert the Knee Lever, which is the black metal queerthing hanging in the back of the case …

The down-pointy end of that is the one which plugs into the hole in the front of the case, and t’other end is the go-faster bit.

OK so far? How it’s used is simplicty itself. Place the machine on your table close to the front edge of it, plug the usual old Singer plug into the socket under the balance wheel, then insert the knee-lever into that hole on the front. It only goes in one way and there’s a bit of a knack to it, but once you realise exactly how it fits, you’re laughing. You then switch the power on at the wall socket (‘cos nowadays we don’t run sewing machines off a light fitting) and prepare to do some serious sewing.

It’s at this point that you wonder why on earth the lever doesn’t hang more or less straight down, as you might expect it to. It actually hangs at about 7 o’clock, and that seems all wrong – until you realise that Singer in their wisdom wanted you to sit more to the left than you perhaps normally would, so you move your chair accordingly. Et voilà, the lever falls conveniently against your right knee (or lower thigh, depending) and off you go. A gentle right-wards pressure speeds the motor up nice and progressively, and when you return your leg to its resting position, the motor slows and stops.

How it works is simple. Inside the compartment on the right of the base, under a slightly different black steel lid to the usual one in that this one has a screw holding it shut, is the mechanism of the speed controller. It’s pretty much the same as is in the usual floor pedal. When you insert the knee-lever into the magic hole, it connects via an ingenious linkage to the actual speed controller thingy, which doesn’t care in the slightest whether its innards are moved by a lever or by a button on a box on the floor.

So now you know how it all works, you’re wondering why. As in, what’s the point? Well, for a start, if you’re not blessed with two feet which work pretty much normally, and especially if you’re in a wheelchair, the knee-lever is brilliant. You don’t have a foot pedal kicking about on the floor with a wire running from it up to the machine, and there’s only one wire coming out the plug under the balance wheel. And after that, I’m struggling …

I have no idea when Singer dropped the knee-lever variant, but it was certainly after 1951 because the 99 in that snap is a Centenary model. Nor am I sure for which models it was available, but I do know that I’ve seen a knee-lever 66, a 99 and a 201.

Elsie’s not a big fan of knee-levers, and as far as I’m concerned they’re just an interesting variation on the normal. From my point of view, though, they have two drawbacks. One is that they’re a pig to re-wire because of the way the wiring’s crowded in on the machine (and in view of their age, most of them need re-wiring). The other’s that although the actual conversion to foot pedal control is straightforward enough, you’re left with that hole in the front of the base and you need a new lid for the side compartment.

I think that’s it. If it isn’t, do leave me a comment!

Aug10

The Singer 201K

Posted on 10/08/2011 by Sid

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I was going to waffle on about the Singer 201K and the difference between the Mk1 and the Mk2, and have a bit of a rant about the way these things are described on Ebay as semi-industrial sewing machines and so on while I was at it, but it’s become obvious that would have been one hell of a long post. So I’ll do it in stages.

Before I do though, it occurred to me that I had a good opportunity to take a snap of the two different coloured 201Mk2 heads that were available in the UK side by side, so here it is.

The black one is Elsie’s, carefully removed for the purposes of the picture from the treadle cabinet in which it lives in The Sewing Room. That one’s exactly as brought home from a house in the far east of Essex which had what must be the most awkward access off the road I’ve ever seen in a built-up area, and believe me I’ve seen some. So you’re driving along a two-lane dual carriageway which has a 50mph limit, in heavy traffic which is averaging nearer 60. You’re looking for number 312, and the first number you can actually read is 800-odd. All the houses are identikit 1930’s semis, and they all have very narrow shared “drives” which are about 4 car lengths from kerbside to front door. The posties must love it.

Naturally you miss number 312, so you drive another mile or so the the lights with the “No U-turn” sign, and do a U-turn back to the roundabout two miles back the way you came and try again.

Twice.

Then having positively identified the target, there’s the small matter of trying to convey to the driver of the Belgian artic which is right on your tail that you need to stop on the double yellow lines and reverse onto a narrow bit of tarmac. Yes, it worked in the end, but boy did that truck driver ever get cross. What a loud horn his wagon had. But so what. Have you seen the way they drive in Brussels? Or at least they did when Elsie and I went through it on a motorbike in 1984 …

Anyhow, getting back on track, the lovely black one is Elsie’s.

That scruffy brown thing is what came home with me last night and spent the night in the bike shed ‘cos it stinks, albeit not as much as the treadle cabinet which it was in does, which is why that’s been banished to the yard for scrapping once I’ve salvaged the useful bits off it.

The machine itself is all there though and will be fine once I’ve eventually fettled it and Elsie’s worked her magic on all the grot. That’s going to be a slow job, but it’ll have been worth turning up in downtown Catford for last night, too early for the rioting but not too early to be bemused by the sight of about 20 of the Met’s finest who were gathered outside that lovely art deco cinema suddenly start running in all directions for no apparent reason.

’tis a strange world in which we live …

oldsingersewingmachineblog

A blog about our vintage Singer sewing machines and the attachments for them including ones we have for sale, with occasional stuff about cycling, chickens, planet-saving and so on

Category Archives: Vintage Singer sewing machines

Singer 66 and Singer 99 slide plate – how to remove and replace it

Vintage Singer 99 handcrank – times two!

The joy of Ebay #1

Bobbins for vintage Singers

The most toys

Cabinets and treadle bases for vintage Singer sewing machines

“Your Singer needs new brushes, madam”

Vintage Singer sewing machine attachments

Singer knee lever sewing machines

The Singer 201K

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