Last week, I paid a visit to a family friend. She was a retired tailor who had been sewing ever since she was a little girl. She learnt how to sew on her mother’s old Singer treadle-machine…which has since been sold out of her family.
Her friends had an old Singer treadle-machine that had been in their family for a while and which they had absolutely no use for. Not sure what else to do with it, they gave the old sewing-machine to her as a birthday present, and it now sits on a scrap piece of carpet/rug in her living-room, as a display-piece.
The machine had been through a rough old time. According to my friend, it had sat in her friend’s garage for years, untouched. It’d been rained on and dripped on and neglected and left to rot. She cleaned it up some when she had it moved into her house, just so that it wouldn’t track grime everywhere, but other than that, she’d never touched it.
When I told her I was interested in having a look at the machine, she tried to show me how it worked, but found out that she couldn’t, because the presser-foot lever was jammed in place! I told her that if she wanted, I’d be happy to fix it for her. For a really simple ‘non-functional-to-operational-condition’ quick fixer-upper, I would need pliers, machine-oil, a rag, a box of tissues, tweezers, a screwdriver, and a powerful torch. She found these things for me, and I set to work.
The handwheel spun around really nicely and the needle-bar and takeup lever and the oscillating hook and the feed-dogs were all moving perfectly; I oiled them anyway, just in case, but the foot-lever, and the foot-tension screw were completely jammed from years of neglect. Neglect and possibly, rust. It took a lot of tissue-wiping to remove all the dust, gunk, grime and crap that had built up inside the machine, and a lot of oil, and quite a bit of force with the pliers, to get the tension-knob moving up and down like it should. I kept turning it all the way one way, and then all the way the other way, up and down, to clean off the gunk inside the threads of the foot-bar, and replace the grime with oil, to make it screw up and down more smoothly.
This was my first time working on what we found out later, was a Singer Model 15. This information (along with much more!) was supplied to us when we found the original, 80-year-old manual inside one of the drawers of the machine! I wasn’t entirely sure how this machine all went together, but I figured it out in the end and found out where I had to put the oil.
By the time I’d satisfied myself that the tension-screw for the presser-foot was moving about as well as it was going to, the oil that I’d let soak into the other parts of the presser-foot bar had pretty much done its job. All I had to do was to add a drop of oil at the very top of the presser-foot bar (to let it run all the way down the sides of the shaft), and then I started working the presser-foot lever up and down several times, to spread the oil around. In the beginning, I had to apply a bit of force to the foot-bar to encourage it to move, but once the oil got into everywhere, it moved freely and comfortably with no issues.
After that, I pulled apart the rest of the machine – the clutch-wheel at the back, and so-forth, and cleaned, polished and oiled all those parts of the machine as well, before putting the whole thing back together.
This was a rather rushed, spur-of-the-moment fixup which I hadn’t intended to do when I went to visit, but which I ended up doing, anyway! All up, the job took about two hours. Of course, I could’ve done a much better and more intricate job and cleaned up the ENTIRE machine to like-new condition, but I didn’t have the time to do that. I got it running at least, and that was the main thing.
We fitted in a new needle, we threaded it up and took it for a spin. It worked perfectly!
When you’re working on these old, purely mechanical machines, with solid steel parts (such as the old treadle, hand-crank, or early electric-power machines, mostly pre-1950s), you shouldn’t be afraid to use a *bit* of extra force when encouraging the mechanism to move. Don’t try and break it (if you do that, then you’ve got some serious upper-body strength, these machines are nearly indestructible!), but at the same time, if the mechanism clearly isn’t going to move…don’t try and make it. Most likely, you just need patience, to let the oil do its job. Let it soak in for a few minutes, and then try again a little bit later.
Anyway, back to the machine…
The treadle-mechanism doesn’t work, yet. The old belt was broken and my friend hadn’t had a chance to find a new one yet. But it works fine just by turning the handwheel…by hand…and I’m pretty happy with the results. She said she’d get her husband to fit on a new belt, and then she would clean up the rest of the machine in her own time, and start using it for sewing! Yay!
Another beautiful vintage machine brought back to life and saved from the scrap-heap. And all in two hours, with stuff that you can probably find around the house, or buy at your local hardware shop.
These are just some of the photographs I took of the machine. Yes, they’re a bit blurry, but that’s cause I took them in a hurry…
And last but not least, the serial-number…
An EC-XXX-XXX serial-number dates this machine to 1939, so pre-WWII.