Seb! First of all, welcome! We always like new people, and new people who immediately post pictures are the very most popular of all. Your Excelsior fascinates me, because I have never seen a machine like it, even in pictures. Where does the thread go? I hope you post another picture after you thread it, hint, hint.
Your comment on German goods after the war was also interesting. Here in America, many of us had fathers who were "in the war." They told us various things, but it was still distant from us. Comments like yours remind me again how young America is. We have stories about it, you walk down the street and see bullet marks on the buildings and when you get home, your building might be older than our whole country. It makes my head spin sometimes when I think about it.