More Shiny Bits! 1931 Singer 15-91 Nickel Plated

 I've always been interested in the first year 15-91s that have all the plating on them.  Black Swan is even wearing the Stitch Indicator Plate off of a '31.  So there was palpable excitement in the house when this little, umm.... beauty(?) showed up on Shopgoodwill.

Shopgoodwill has been kind of crazy since the plague hit, so I was expecting to see this guy go for around $100.  I put my bid in and promptly figured I would wave buh-bye when the price went through the roof during the last hour.  I mean granted, it's a little worse for wear.  But 221s in this condition are going for $300+  Shoot even 40x/50x are well over a hundred bucks a pop now.  So I was pretty tickled when I won it for $52 plus ten bucks shipping from Maryland.

It took a while to get it.  Almost two weeks. In comparison I ordered some 201 parts from Helen Howes in the UK the following week and they arrived on the same day that the 15-91 showed up.  That said, the folks at Horizon Goodwill in Maryland do get bonus points for a really good packing job.

Lots of bubble wrap, that recycled carboard filler, more cardboard as armor plating and more bubble wrap.  Good thing too, cause it looked like FedEx made a solid effort at destroying it.

After a good fifteen minutes of unwrapping I got my first in person glimpse.  Ugh, maybe fifty plus shipping was generous.

Bah, who am I kidding, I would have paid more. But it does have some issues.  Solidly seized up, it wasn't going to turn without some love.  The bed has been repainted, with a brush... and a whole lotta paint.  There are globs all over it.  That rippley looking area in front of the needle plate?  Yeah that is massive paint bubbles.  I ended up going after it with the Dremel and a wire brush just to knock it down a bit.

The Stitch Indicator plate had been put on backwards.  One of the screws for it is incorrect as well.  It is also missing the set screw for the Presser Bar Lifter Hinge Stud.  The nickel plating on the badge had been painted over with black paint.  The throat plate is wrong, correct part but the one on it is the blacked out variety.

The motor was DOA.  I wasn't took concerned about that.  I have some more 15-88 parts coming from Helen, so I just kind of figured that I was just going to end up with another cool treadle machine.

Plus all the expected grunge, rust, dead spiders, etc... that are a given.

I had done an 'unboxing' video to post on Youtube, but as I was making it I started to look at little bits here and there thinking.  'Oh, I can give that a quick clean.'  Well I started taking things off and next thing you know...

The next day I went out to the sewing room and pulled down the cleaning supplies.  Gojo-ing, Dremel-ing, Mother-ing commenced in earnest.  First thing was to get that black paint off of the badge.

I don't remove the Shuttle Driver shaft on 15s since it has press fits holding it together.  So I just cleaned and lubed it in place.  When I started putting everything together I was kind of surprised to see all that rust flowing out of it.  Wow.

On the good side, all that rust was what was locking the machine up.  As it melted away the motion began to free up.  It was still a little sticky at the bottom of the needle stroke for a bit, but eventually it began spinning free.

I did create some tension drama putting the assembly back together.  For some reason I decided to give the takeup spring a full turn around the shaft.  Made it nice and springy, but also add a few dozen grams of tension.  Took me about half an hour to chase down why I couldn't get good stitches unless I had the bobbin tension set to 80 grams.    Oh and I really like the indicator on this tension assembly.  Way cool.

Feeling pretty good about finding issues with... hmmm... need a name.  The Plated Damsel? meh... I'll keep working on it.  Anyway I decided to give the motor a look.  Taking it apart I found no problems.  Then it dawned on me.  Given the fact that whoever messed with it lost parts and put parts on backwards.  Maybe they messed up the wiring block.

I admit, when I took it apart I didn't even pay attention to how they had it wired in.  If I had, I probably would have noticed the issue, because when I reconnected everything myself the motor spun to life with not problem.  I scraped out the dry grease and gave it a nice slathering of new stuff then it was off to the races.  After replacing the blacked out throat plate and feed dogs with a set off a 15-30 sitting nearby.

Stitches aren't perfect-perfect.  But since the only adjustments was for tension so far I'm pretty satisfied.

As I said I was originally going to do an unboxing video, but instead I wound up doing a short three minute or so cleaning video and a bit of stitching at the end.