Originally Posted by ssgramma
I have seen postings with the actual date of "birth" given. Where do you look to determine that? My serial # had an allotment of 8000 on 11/11/1936 and the next allotment of 201's was 3/17/1937 so would I just assume I fall between those dates?
The date on singers site (if those are the S/N's you're looking at) are allotment dates. As I understand it, that's the date that that particular allotment was 'started'... But, in answer to the 'ending' date portion of your question, I believe they manufactured different machines in batches. So the end date of possible manufacture of your 201, is
not the date of the next batch of 201's, but the next date of the very next batch, no matter what kind of machine it was. Note that the S/N's were simply assigned in sequencial order no matter what type, kind of machine it was.
There's a lot of folks who simply reference the allotment start date as the exact birthdate of their machine. Not necessarily so. In fact, likely not. That new to me 15-91 I just got, has an allotment date of 3/2/42. My actual S/N falls towards the middle of that run, therefore it probably wasn't produced exactly on the 2nd. But I can tell based on the next batch's allotment date, that my machine rolled off the factory lines in the month of March of 1942... even if I can't pinpoint the exact date it would have done so.
All ya'all correct me if I'm wrong now...