I was working on Anna, and while I think the 15-91s are awesome machines, I hate dealing with rewiring motors. That's all that's left on Anna, so I'm looking for ways to distract myself from tearing down the potted motor.
Yesterday the treadle belts arrived from Sew-Classic. That meant messing about some more with the IF. I had noticed some weirdness with it to begin with. The peddle would hit the floor before the wheel was at the top of its motion for one thing. Not being able to finish a stroke makes treadling a little difficult.
I was puzzled, thinking maybe it was supposed to have a 20" pitman or something, but not terribly worried. Then when I put the belt on it got really troubling. Coming down the back side of the cabinet the belt had to turn and come forward about four inches to go through the guide. Now I was perplexed. Even my wife said it looked wrong.
While noodling over what could possibly be wrong I started comparing it to the later treadles. That's when it finally hit me. The back brace was tilted forward! D'oh!
Now on a later treadle it would be annoying, but relatively easy to fix. I guess people tilting the brace the wrong way was enough of a problem that Singer began putting bolt holes at the 'front' and 'back' of the top of the legs so you could make the adjustment. Not so on the older models. The only way to fix it is to take the legs off and swap sides with them. The bolts were grunged in place pretty good. It took me and my son about thirty minutes to get them all free. But we finally got the brace on right.
Peddle motion and belt alignment solved it was time to put on the belt. I have some I bought from an Amazon vendor for 8 dollars a pop. They are good belts no doubt, but, while looking around Sew-Classic I noticed they were selling belts for 5 bucks each. I ordered a five, just to have a stockpile. You never know when there will be a shortage of cheesy purple rope.
With the belt and another generous oiling of all moving parts it was time to load up a bobbin and start stitching.
It should be noted here that I have done no cleaning at all on the machine. Actually as the whole back brace fiasco proves, I hadn't even done a thorough inspection at this point. So tossing some thread on it and treadling away was sure to be an experience is horrific stitching.
The bottom right threads are what were created during the first trial. The view is the bottom side of the stitches. Pro-tip: If your machine pulls 6 inches of spool thread through, turns it black, then snaps it off with each stitch, you have a problem.
In my case it was a hundred-plus years of grime and rust caking the hook and shuttle. A half hour of buffing everything with some fine steel wool cleared the problem right up (It was too dark to dremel on the back porch like I normally would).
Stitches aren't quite as good as the later 15s do, but for a machine that's 133 years old I think they are darn skippy. Better than the stitches of my super-rare-extremely-valuable-Red-Eye! 66 for sure.
Speaking of later 15s, or even later Improved Familys here is a bit of information I learned. The tension assemblies were a work in progress. Every couple of years Singer would fiddle with the configuration. I thought I had some more problems with the machine being assembled wrong because I was comparing what the tension assembly should be to that from the 1891 parts catalogue. John and Bruce from TreadleOn set me straight. My tension assembly was not missing anything, well, other than the take-up spring which had snapped off. I replaced it with one from a 66. The guys pointed out I could use one off of a 27 and it would be a more appropriate fit.
While looking at parts from a 27 tension assembly I decided to cheat a bit. Since the IF doesn't have a tension release lever, I borrowed the one off the 1896 27-3. I'll put it back after I find another, promise.
So there we go. I'm up to four fully functioning treadle machines now. Just need to get some tops built for the Davis irons to put a few more machines online around the house.
Now back to rewiring a potted motor. Ugh, new-tech (well tech that's only 80 years old) can be so boring at times.
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