I fiddled with “Old Dirty”, my Singer 111W153 Combination Feed Walking Foot machine today. It had been over a year since I’d used him. He’s the high-speed walking foot machine in my herd, and with a 3470 RPM motor and no speed reduction, he does cover some ground. I’ve never ran him wide-open, but I’ve ran him fast enough to break the polyester thread that he uses. I did that top-stitching a mesh and webbing pool cover repair a while back.
While the head itself lives in the bike shop, at least during the winter, his power stand lives out on the back covered patio under a custom-made vinyl cover. I found very little damage or contamination to the stand having it outside covered and unused for over a year. The thread tower is developing some surface rust as well as the cheap screwdriver in the drawer, but the top hasn’t received any damage at all. I had a little trouble controlling the speed, so the rubber V-belt may be drying out. And since I hadn’t run him for a long period of time, maybe I’m just out of practice, too. At any rate, it didn’t take us long to replace a sun-damaged surface fabric for a stand-alone hammock with him.
Working out on the patio in the Oklahoma heat, my wife and I used Sunbrella to sandwich with the fiber pad and mesh bottom fabric that were still good in the existing hammock. Nearly everything was long runs, so the speed of Old Dirty was actually a plus. We set up a temporary table (saw horses and a sheet of 3/4” plywood) to begin cutting fabric at around 10 this morning, and had everything put away by two-thirty. We took at least three breaks to start the laundry and have a cool drink during that time, and for most of the morning, my wife was working on letting out a bedazzled dinner coat on her Singer 301A inside at her work station. We don’t hurry too much around here on a Sunday, so we took it nice and easy. But still, the air conditioning in the house sure felt good when we got back inside to stay! Now, to see if it still fits on the frame when my friend tries to put it back together on his stand.
CD in Oklahoma