A Gift From The Universe

When I picked up the seven drawer treadle it had a lot of top clamping presser feet with it.  It also has some non-Singer bobbins and bobbin carriers.

As far as I know Singer never made a top clamping machine, so the feet were curiosities but not much more to me.  I did search online enough to find that the bobbins and carriers were most likely for a White.  My initial plan was to find someone with a need and pass them along.

Yesterday in my trolling of Craigslist I saw an ad listing curbside freebies in Granby Connecticut, about 20 miles from us.  The photo in the ad was the standard dark and blurry cell phone photo that accompanies all Craigslist ads so the machine was more or less unidentifiable.  We decided to go out for a drive and see what it was.

Not a Singer, but it was free and was sitting on the curb in the middle of winter.  There was a little bit of a "aww, poor little sewing machine," so we bundled it and its table off.  The table is in really bad shape with a bad smell.  It went immediately into the basement.  The head isn't in much better shape, at least it doesn't have an odor.  I brought the it upstairs and began to tinker around and to do some googling for any manuals I could find.

Unlike Singer, there is not much online documentation available for Domestic.  One thing I noticed what how similar this machine was in appearance to a Franklin.  I figured that it was a Domestic knock off of a Franklin.  My internet education quickly corrected this.  Franklin was made by Domestic.  And Domestic was bought by White in the 1920s.  I found a manual for a 1926 Franklin Rotary online and so far it is an exact match for this machine.

Dating the machine has been an exercise in futility so far.  My only resources are the internet.  I tried to locate a copy of Charles Law's "The Encyclopedia of Antique Sewing Machines" which from what I read is the must have book for tracking old machines.  But it's about as hard to find as a Domestic serial number database.

Between frustrating internet searches I continued taking the machine slowly apart photographing every screw in location before removing it.  The more I take the machine apart the worse it condition appears.  It will be a real challenge to get it back in any kind of shape.  But it will be fun.

Back to the bobbins.  When I first began taking the machine apart I noticed there was no bobbin carrier.  I was a little bummed.  I dug through the table and the extras that came with it and found nothing.  Finding the information about the whole Domestic/Franklin/White cluster did have me thinking about the bobbins and carriers I had picked up in Boston, but I had shuffled them off into a drawer somewhere I couldn't easily find them to check (I have lots of nooks and crannies with machine parts at the moment).  Then when I saw the instruction manual I recognized that they ones I had were correct.  I managed to locate them and sure enough it is a match.

As an added bonus the machine came with its own impressive sets of accessories, separate from the items in the first photo.  Enough to have a fully functioning sewing system once it is cleaned up.

So I have a quandary now.  The machine isn't a Singer.  I had been limiting myself to Singers to keep from having an explosion of machines in the house.  But it is a rotating vertical hook, like the 115, which is my dream-machine.  Do I fix it up and keep it?  Do I fix it up and pass it along?  Right now I'm leaning towards fixing it up and using it to trade for another treadle.  But that plan will probably change ten times before I get it finished.

If there are any Domestic experts out there, or anyone who just isn't completely clueless like me about them, I would appreciate hearing from you.  My best uneducated guess is that this is from the 1920s-1930s, but I'm basing that simply on conjecture made by others.  Any information would be helpful.  Especially if anyone knows where to get a copy of Charles Law's book.

Also at the moment the machine is up for trade to anyone in the northeast who has a complete Singer straight leg treadle without a head.