Cigarette Smoke Covered Sewing Machines
 

I see a lot of posts that mention sewing machines “covered with cigarette smoke”, “coated with smoke...the brown of tobacco and nicotine”, “coated with cigarette smoke grime”, and so forth......

Considering the age of some of our “vintage” machines, I wonder if there are times when a foreign coating on a machine or cabinet might be misdiagnosed as cigarette smoke, when it could be something else?

I would think that many of my old sewing machines could have been in homes that were heated with coal or heating oil, by stoves or furnaces that didn’t always send all of the smoke out the chimney like they were supposed to do. And some older machines were possibly used around oil lamps as well. Possibly with the lamp setting right on the cabinet.

Do you suppose that some of the gunk on old sewing machines that we think is tobacco smoke could be coal or oil smoke instead, and that some of the previous owners never touched a cigarette in their life?

Here’s a scenario for you:
Ma & Pa have finished their evening meal and retired to the parlor where they can soak up the warmth from the coal stove before retiring on to bed. Ma sets down to her treadle sewing machine while Pa nestles down in the big old stuffed chair nearby and fires up his favorite pipe. Pa had lit a couple of oil lamps right after stoking up the stove with a little shot of kerosene while Ma was clearing the dishes away. Ma has one lamp setting on her sewing machine to light up her work area, and Pa has one on the stand next to his chair so he can read the newspaper. After a fairly long spell, Pa gets up, opens the shove door, and banks up the fire with more coal for the night. Soon after, both Ma and Pa retire to bed for the night.

Ok now. How much of the gunk on Ma’s sewing machine is from tobacco?

CD in Oklahoma

Cigarette Smoke Covered Sewing Machines

I remember the ranch house that my Grandma lived in Colorado. It had a coal “Warm Morning” stove in the main room for heat (there wasn’t a parlor) and a wood cook stove in the kitchen. She used to let me try to run the shaker on the Warm Morning that shuffled the ashes and small clinkers down into the ash pan. I wasn’t strong enough to do it very well, but she’d let me try. Whenever either door was opened (top one for putting in more coal, bottom one for removing the ashes) some smoke would escape into the room. It was just part of having coal heat. During use (winter) the stove never cooled completely off, so the doors were opened regularly with smoke in the stove, and a little smoke always got out. I can see why folks were so glad to get electric or gas heat back in those days!

She had regular electricity so the only time she used oil lamps was during an outage. As a side note, she did have the old bare wires going around the wall just below the ceiling on porcelain insulators (long since disconnected, of course), from the first electrical service to the house. I’m trying to think of the name for the porcelain tubes that went through the wall for the bare wires to come in from outside....

CD in Oklahoma

I've never knob & tube wiring in the living space. I've only seen it in attics and walls. I guess if it was fitted afterward, it would be where ever the electrician could put it. IIRC Romex style wiring came out right around WWII. My first house was built in 1946 and had the old style Romex with the cloth outer covering.

I used to do cable and satellite tv. It's been a very long time since I've been in the house of a serious chain smoker. There's not nearly as many of them as there used to be. Sometimes that "nicotine" that we scrub off so vigorously is actually the deteriorated shellac clearcoat too.
Rodney

I bought one here in Dallas and it was yellow from cigarette smoke. I knew the owner and she smoked like those old stoves. LOL We grew up with a "Warm Morning" stove. they were wonderful. We also had big time spring and fall house cleaning, "Where everything in the room or 2 came out of the house into the yard". Then we scrubbed, rinsed, waxed and shined everything that could be. I hated those days. We got yanked out of bed and went to work.ha.

I don't do really old machines, but I have had a couple of mid-century machines that were coated with a film of nicotine. The scent is pretty noticeable once you start cleaning it.

The smell left from cigarettes is a very distinctive (disgusting) smell. I am a reformed smoker and we are the worst critics!

Colleen

That's a really good scenario CD. Great food for thought. But, here's another scenario from a more recent time(50s, 60s or even 70s), from my families point of view.

Mom, Dad, and a few friends are sitting around the table after dinner on a usual Saturday night or it could have been a Tuesday, ashtrays conveniently placed and a fresh beer in everyones' hand.... Naturally the men are talking fishing, cars and other manly things. The women are talking about the kids, the price of groceries, Aunt Lindas(name changed to protect the guilty) latest antics and Moms' new curtains. She points to a case sitting on a table by the window and proudly says she made them on her new Brother sewing machine she bought just last week.

Now fast forward 40 or 50 years, after all those Tuesday and Saturday and other nights, and all the miles of sewing mom did while a cigarette sat next to her in the ashtray, how much of the gunk is from something else?

Cari

When I was cleaning my 31-15 I knew it was from cigarettes. But I knew the house it lived in for all those years and everything came out of there just like that. My 500a was the same. You could smell it too.
Some do, some are just the shellac. Folks that are new to this can't always tell the difference.

I bought a Pfaff 130 that had a coating of something that I was never able to ascertain. It reeked but not like cigarettes. But it smelled kind of familiar. Man, I hated cleaning it. But, that film probably protected it because the machine's clear coat is in very good shape. I've decided that for many years, it was sitting in or near a kitchen and the fry oil and other kitchen fumes created that crusty film that covered every single square millimeter and orifice of that machine.