Lisa continued
I have a couple of upcoming speaking events. On Oct. 25 I will be presenting a talk at the Colorado Quilt Council about basic sewing machine function and maintenance and how to keep your machine out of the shop and when it really does need professional attention. Then on Nov. 9 I will be doing the “Sunday at the Museum” at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum. I guess they felt guilty about cutting my presentation short last year. ?? My talk will be about the evolution of the sewing machine, concentrating less on the political history of its development (like last time) and more on functional machine components and how they evolved.
A special thank you to Gary for giving me a tour of his latest acquisitions and selling me a Singer 27 bobbin winder. I had to do some fancy electrical work to bring it to a safe state, but it turned out great. The machine was for a client who was delighted to have a machine that is now fully functional.
~ Lisa Selzler
Courtney
Courtney tells of a machine he recently acquired, but unfortunately with bad packing.
This month I have a sad story. We have all heard stories of sewing machines ruined in shipment. I have such a story, I purchased on line a small ¾ size Vickers hand crank sewing machine. It looked to be in rather sad condition but looked like something I could restore to decent condition. As a kid I was fascinated by World War I biplanes and many of the English planes, like the Sopwith Camel and the SPAD XIII, were armed with Vickers machine guns. It's interesting that with the outbreak of WWI, England was not going to be able to import German sewing machines, so Vickers started into studying the possibility of manufacturing sewing machines. They seemed to have been popular in the UK between the two World Wars.
I was excited to get the little Vickers machine but as I opened the box I could tell there might be some problems as the arched top case had some holes in it. As I went further things got worse. On the inside the hand crank had been completely broken off. And even worse as I looked at the machine I could see the the machine’s base plate had a large Y crack in it. Underneath it was obvious that some of the support ribs were cracked. I think the damage had been caused by two major factors. First was the packing of the machine. Even though the machine head had been wrapped in bubble wrap, it was not secured to the base and had become loose and had flopped around during shipment. The other factor was the machine must have been rather violently handled during shipment. I had not paid much and did get my money refunded but would have preferred the machine. I have not looked carefully to see what I might be able to salvage. The four bobbins look very similar to the bobbins in my Jones machine. I will also see if the shuttle will fit, I am not sure if I will be able to salvage much else. Sad to see such a cute little machine mistreated so badly.
In Closing
Looks like fall is around the corner. That is all for this month. Thanks for reading.