Plastic Gears; To Grease or Not To Grease, THAT is the question.
We've talked about this many times before, some articles say grease them. Some say never grease them. Some hem and haw on the subject. So I thought I would revisit the subject now that I had some pictures to show you.
So, let me show you a machine that we just acquired. It's a mid 90s vintage Singer 3343C made in Brazil. Mostly plastic ... yuck ... but it uses the flat cams and came with a set of 30, sews nicely and we got it cheep
. Even if the machine didn't sew, the cams are worth what we paid for it.
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A couple years ago we got a Singer 4622A. All the plastic gears were slathered in some kind of white grease. It had been worked on, that much I could tell, so I didn't know for sure weather Singer put that grease in there when the machine was built, or someone else did it later. Since it was kind of stiffish I cleaned most of that old grease off and replaced it with white lithium grease. Then later after reading a post on the Sew-Classic blog about white lithium grease, I clean the gears off again and regreased them with Tri-Flow grease.
The 3343 we got yesterday had all the plastic gears fairly slopped in white grease. I'm as sure as I can be that this machine has never been serviced. As a mater of fact it looks so clean and new inside it doesn't look to have been used much at all. The only reason I had the covers apart is the old oil had gummed up and the presser foot and ZZ parts were sluggish. They had to be lubed and freed up.
So here is a couple pics of the insides of this machine:
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Looking into the top, you can see the top shaft and vertical shaft top gear and the cam drive gear are all covered in grease. You can also see the grease on some of the internal control parts. This has to be from the factory as there are no signs this machine has ever been apart.
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Looking into the bottom you can see the bobbin drive belt set up. The other rods are stamped metal.
There is really nothing substantial in this machine.
The grease used in this machine and the 4622A looks to be the white Singer gear grease sold in their current little tubes or something very similar. After seeing these two machines, I now believe I have enough proof to support the use of grease on Singer plastic gears, so I wont' hesitate to use grease on any plastic geared Singer.
On other brands I'm not so sure yet.
Joe