Originally Posted by
grant15clone
Joe, My bad. I was trying to go by memory. And my memory can't be trusted. I know that I read something that told me the changeover to plastic. But like all things on the interweb, who knows if it was even true. Besides, I misplaced it. I will try to find that again. Maybe what I read was specifically for the Touch and Sew line only. That would make sense to me. This is a picture of a 603E. BTW, does anyone know what the "E" is for? I also have a 600E. As you can see it has metal gears.
(omitted the pics -- madcow333)
It would make sense that if it is in the T&S line, that the change from metal to plastic was in between these model numbers. UNLESS the higher end models had metal and lower end models had plastic gears. But that would go against what I read recently.
I wish there was a list of machines that said if it had metal or plastic gears in them.
I am going to have to look into this more. I thought I had it down pat. If I can get a list together I will post it for all in it's own separate thread so it is easily accessed by anyone. I think that would be a great piece of reference material for a lot of us. Especially me that can't remember where I leave lists like this.
~G~
600 model is an Auto Reel (that refers to the bobbin winder), and I think that might not actually have been called a Touch & Sew yet. 600E was a change in the bobbin winder mechanism to supposedly make it work better. The 600 has to be manually reset after the bobbin is wound, but the 600E automatically resets. Those might have been the first wind in place bobbins for Singer? I don't remember.
603 and 603E are identical to the 600 / 600E except they don't have the internal cam stack. These machines are all built similar to the 401/403/500/502 Slants.
Sometime in the 620 series is when the nylon or plastic gears came in. If I recall, 620, 626, 628 are mostly reported as having metal gears, but there is some controversy over that and some people believe that some of those got plastic gears instead of metal. Any Golden T&S 630 and up and all of the 700 series are plastics. I used to have an exact model list for metal gear T&S but that was in 2000 and I have changed computers 6 times since then. lol
eta: There is a 625 T&S and it's gray + dark gray front plate, so probably it's metal, too. It appears to have an internal cam stack.