Candace

This warning isn't about the all metal, Japanese made machines from Brother in the 50's to early 70's, but is about Brother machines from the late 70's early 80's that have 80% metal insides and mostly metal bodies, but a huge amount of nylon parts. So far, I've had 4 different Brother machines from that time frame and out of the 4, ALL of them have had broken cam stacks and gears and are unrepairable. Parts are either NLA or simply way too costly to buy. I've not seen a Brother machine from these lines that haven't been parts machines.

I had a friend call me a few weeks ago who wanted to sell me "what she thought was an old Pfaff". I went over and it was a Brother Boutique. Kind of cute, with pink accents, but I knew from my past experience to look under the hood! And sure enough this is what I found. The broken/cracked gears are marked. The fork is even nylon and is also stress fractured. It can't even sew a straight stitch in the current state. My friend handed off the machine to me as a parts machine and I spend part of the day taking it apart. I thought I'd post some photos of what's under the hood on these models.

So far I've seen this on the Pacesetter, Boutique and Galaxie models. I'm sure there are more.

Be sure to test sew any Brother machines you may be interested in and look under the top or pass on them completely. Way too many breaking points on these machines and not worth saving, IMO.