I'm new to antique machines , but I decided it was time to clean my garage sale find, an old Singer in a table. I just did my first Featherweight last week, so even with no manual I thought I'd be OK. I opened up the machine and cleaned out the dust bunnies , the lint and old grease, oiled it up and had everything turning freely. DH had checked out the cord and no frays, so I plugged it in and it went flying on it's own! Startled me to the point, I nearly fell out of the chair. Oops maybe the on/off switch is stuck. Nope, no on /off switch and the light didn't work either. Why not, HMM, well where is the switch. Called to DH he looked and said, this was a treadle that someone electrified, never had seen one of those before, but that was OK. I didn't pay much and this was an experiment in having an old machine. I removed the light, it looked OK but must be I needed a new new one. DH helped me open the presser foot and we noticed it had been opened before and not repaired correctly, the screws didn't match up and contacts were not even. He loves fussing with that stuff so he worked on it a while and got it fixed up.
All back together, plugged it in and and once again, it took off on it's own. Since we don't have ghosts, what was happening? There were 2 electric cords plugged into outlets mounted inside the cabinet. The cords were fine, but I unplugged them and noticed one outlet was marked "motor" and the other "light", and of course they were in the wrong sockets. I hadn't unplugged them before so it's been this way for a while.
Changed them around worked fine, put the light back in and it worked too! It's a little noisy, so I need to check on that, but after several hours of work, we only needed to move the plugs to the correct switch. Oh well, I guess is was the learning experince outside what I had planned on!!