Originally Posted by
KittyKat77
I am trying to fix up my Davis, and it is looking better... the black areas no longer have that icky sticky orange peel texture, BUT, some of the areas with the decals seem stubborn, and despite going very slow and cautious, I ended up with a bit of silvering. It may be the damaged shellac is adhered so strongly to the decals that anything affecting the shellac will damage the decals. Talk about a catch-22. It's made me nervous to continue!
I have been focusing instead on cleaning and rust-removal of the metal pieces.
I own two Davis NVF with the same situation of the protective coating and decals damage as yours. Most, not all, but most of the Davis NVF that I have seen seem to have this issue. My suggestion is to only clean these machines with sewing machine oil. The sewing oil is the only chemical that does not remove the decals or "silver" them. For one of my machines, some previous owner used something other than sewing oil which made the decals turn green, not silver. I'm not into using lots of chemicals to clean these vintage ladies and gents since I dislike using them. The sewing oil cleans up the dirt and old oil, that is good enough for me. Since I use my Davis for quilting and binding work, the crackled in the protective coating of the machine doesn't hinder that work or damage the fabrics. The machine still works well! I doubt I will be looking very pretty or even working when I hit a hundred.
