Good guess about vintage. The manual, dated 1969 can be found at
http://www.singerco.com/uploads/down...3bccb631ad.pdf
I guess I could go check mine, but pretty sure it has metal gears (which is a good thing). It is a basic straight stitch machine another good thing for piecing. The manual also has instructions for free motion stitching, but the feed dogs might need to be covered as they had a feed dog cover for it. Some have had success with just setting the stitch length to "0" and let it go at that.
Probably it will need cleaned and oiled. The instructions for that are near the end of the pdf linked to above.
Janey - Neat people never make the exciting discoveries I do.