Brass Head

I have been struggling with this Morse 4100 for a month. It's a '53 or '54, I think, one of the earlier Morse Foto-Matics. The brochure says that the grey color was designed by Japanese scientists using the finest Japanese pigments. I like that even as they were catering to us Americans, they were taking pride in things Japanese. It's a nice blue grey, looks a little more industrial than Eastern Exotic: oh, well.

When I got it, the first thing I noticed was that Every screw head in the machine was deformed. I freed it up, but when I turned it manually, the parts inside were clanking into one another. I knew between the mangled slots and the clanking that I was a victim, and that my Morse was a victim, of some ambitious loon with a mania for adjustment, armed with an unground, paint-spattered screwdriver and probably a little ball peen to boot.

Unfortunately, the 4100 does not have a removable top, so I had to disassemble it like some ship in a bottle, through those goofy little access ports. It had been run so out of whack that one of the control rods was bent and interfering with another moving part. I bent it back: duh.

Eventually, I got it working OK except that the tension is a little different on one side of the zigzag than on the other: teensy loops one side on the bottom , teensy loops the other side on top. Fiddling with the left-right-center gizmo helps, but not consistently. I sort of try for perfection when I fix these things, so I can't really call the job done.

I did notice as I was cleaning it up that the top thread is a little thicker than the bottom one. Could that be it? I tried different needles, etc.

Anyway, up it goes into my wife's sewing room. It pays not to be TOO precise in one's fiddling until a machine has been run a while. Sometimes they get better; sometimes they get bad enough to see what's wrong with them.

Here it is, kinda handsome, I think:

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