Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote this posting about an old Wertheim hand-cranked sewing machine that I bought. Since making that posting, I’d been struggling to find a replacement for the broken bobbin-winder on the machine. Well, this posting now exists because, at long last – I managed to find that replacement, and today, I fitted it onto the machine!

For those of you who don’t remember the Wertheim…here it is:

In this photograph, you may notice the elastic band wrapped around the bobbin-winder. That’s there for a very good reason. Because without it…this happens:

Unfortunately, nothing that I tried was able to fix this problem, so the only choice I had was to completely replace the winder. After asking around, I finally got the word from some friends of mine who had a replacement that they were willing to sell. For a nominal amount, I paid for the replacement and had it shipped to me. It arrived today, and I spent the whole of an hour or so, trying to fit it onto the machine.

The replacement winder. Surface-rust was a small price to pay for a working component. Sandpaper would deal with the grime.

Removing the old winder was the first order of business. The winder was affixed to the machine surprisingly simply. One screw, one bolt, and one spring.

Removing the spring was the easiest bit. A bit of tugging and stretching and it was released from the hook that attached it to the sewing machine. Next came the removal of the screw that held in the bolt, that held the winder onto the body of the machine. This too, was relatively easy, once I’d found the right screwdriver.

So far, so good.

The next step was to remove the winder from the machine. To do this, I had to remove the bolt that attached it to the side of the machine’s pillar. The bolt had a slot in it, so at first I thought that you had to unscrew the whole thing. After a few minutes tinkering with it, however, I realised that this was never going to work.

While I sat around feeling sorry for myself, I started work on the replacement winder. This was in full working order, albeit, very rusty order. I removed the rust with sandpaper, rubbing and grinding it off, and using an ultrasonic cleaner to blast out all the sanded grime. The more I removed now, the less I’d have to remove later. On top of that, it would be easier to remove the rust when the winder was off the machine, rather than on. Once I had removed as much rust as I could reach, or as much as I dared, without damaging the integrity of the piece (I didn’t need TWO broken winders!), and then returned to the one still fixed to the machine.

After examining the replacement winder, I realised that the bolt isn’t actually threaded. It just sits there. Finding a miniature hammer, I started tapping the edge of the winder still on the machine. Tap, tap, tap, tap…milimeter by milimeter, the winder came off, and the bolt came with it. Eventually I was able to just yank it right off. A couple more taps removed the bolt from the broken winder, and I recycled the bolt, and the screw, to mount the working winder onto the side of the machine.

The machine with the bobbin-winder FINALLY removed!

It took me a couple of tries to get the orientation of the new winder right, but once it was, the bolt slipped in smoothly. I cleaned it out with tissue-papers and sewing-machine oil to remove the grime and let it slide better, and once it was on, I tapped it back into place with the hammer, and then replaced the screw that I’d taken out earlier.

And there it is, with the decidedly less-attractive, but infinitely more functional, bobbin-winder fixed on. Mission complete! Fixing this was definitely an adventure, and a long one in the making, but at least it had a happy ending.