It's been 10 years since I've last worked on a vintage or antique sewing machine. I actually sold most of my parts (keeping only a few prized machines for myself and some parts machines if they break) and moved on to repairing other things. I love working with sewing machines, but the truth is, there was very little interest in these beauties and almost no good resources online on how to fix them.
The few sewing machine posts I have on this blog, are some of my best-performing pages. The interest goes up every year and thanks to the ads on my site, I'm earning between 1 and 5 cents per week from them (not much, but every little bit counts). It's amazing how much more interest there is now than 10+ years ago when most of them were written.
A thing happened the other day and I brought home a sewing machine that would, to any sane brain, be considered well and truly beyond repair.
Guess what? oh, you guessed.
That's right, I'm going to see if I can repair it.
I know the worst thing to try to fix is a bad repair, so I'm taking this slow and doing my due diligence. I'm spending a lot of time with my friends duckduckgo and google to see what new information is out there and WOW! The interweb is flooded with advice on how to repair and restore vintage sewing machines.
Most of that advice is horrible! I know this because I've spent many hours repairing the kind of damage following that advice causes.
About 5 to 10% of what's on the internet in this area is good advice. About 50% of what is left is okay, but not going to give the long term life that one wants or cause unnecessary work (most common seems to be removing the shellac or "clear coat" because they mistake it for caked-on oil and grime). The rest of the advice, I'm not sure if it's well-meaning or written by people who want the value of their machine to go up by destroying the existing machines.... evil laughter.
So the ratio is about the same but the quantity to shift through is so much more.
Although I am loving how much of this is on youtube now. But restoration videos are one of my favourites. I wish I had a sound safe studio space where I could make some ASMR repair videos for you all, but alas, something to dream about in the future - living in the country is NOISY (tractors, cars, planes, roosters, geese, sheep... )
Anyway, I really like this guy, as he doesn't recommend things I know will damage the machine.
Some of you have probably already guessed what my new treasure is from the photos. For the rest of you, all will be revealed as I'm going to document this project on my youtube channel.
But evaluating the machine, I also notice that I'll need to spend quite a bit more money on this restoration than usual. It needs new paint, and paint stripper and... I don't even want to think about it yet. Some of this I can improvise. Some I cannot. On the whole, I would be very very lucky if the cost of materials to restore this were less than the final value of the machine. Also, I might keep it as a forever machine. I haven't decided yet.
It's important to me that every hobby be self-funding, so part of this project is looking for creative funding ideas. Youtube now gives me money for ads (at just under a dollar a day for all my videos, so you can guess how small that is per video). But I also don't turn on all the advertising features like commercials that show up in the middle of the video. I can see clicking all the boxes for these sewing machine videos to see if I can the machine to fund its own repair.
In the photos, some of this is rust, most of it is old grease and oil. It will be interesting to find out how much of each.
Happy sewing everyone!
2 comments:
Oh my, you definitely have your work cut out for you. But it sounds like you are up for the challenge!
I agree that the internet is a wonderful place to do research these days, and also that a lot of how-tos and advice aren't helpful and sometimes downright wrong. It's time consuming to sift through them and sometimes difficult to tell if the person really knows what they're talking about. But the good ones are there with a wealth of good information.
Do you have a name or channel for the vintage repair videos you think are good? My old foot treadle needs some work, and I'm about as non-mechanical as a person can get.
Oh, I'm curious to see what machine it is you've found! And count me in among those who will be following your restoration project with great interest. I really need to get started restoring the Singer 127 I have got my hands on last year… Thank you for the video recommandation; I don't know enough (well, I pretty much know nothing at all) about restoring old sewing machines to be able to know good advice from bad, and I'm right there with Leigh in being totally non-mechanical, so I really appreciate having a reference that has your stamp of approval!
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