One followed me home ,,,
 

So there I am, minding my own business and plotting how I'm going to get my "new" #21 cabinet up my narrow, steep stairs, when I get a text with the 1st pic below. I see a pic showing me the top of a dilapidated looking sewing machine cabinet and the question ... "Want another one? It's free".

My brain says "no".
My fingers type "Maybe, is it empty?"

In response, I get the second picture, showing a dusty looking Singer, sporting a potted motor. A 15-91! My brain is now on board and directs my fingers to type "Sure, I need to unload my truck. Give me 40 minutes".

Unloading my truck, something tells me to look again. Did you notice the potted motor but no LIGHT on the back of that Singer? Yep, a 201-2! I broke all the speed limits between me and that machine!

I got it up to my work area and spent an hour or so, wiping and lubricating and you can see it looks pretty nice. The shellac is pretty degraded but it runs smooth and easy. Sometimes they just fall in your lap.

What a story, congrats!

Great save!! The machine is beautiful again! Congrats!

Beautiful machine! A bit of car wax might help the finish. . .

Thanks, folks. Wax may not be a bad idea. I'm thinking of looking through the article here about restoring shellac. This one is pretty nice, overall.

From everything that I understand, re-shellacking the machine may well be pretty much as easy as polishing it with car wax. And it's pretty much guaranteed to look better.

I used car was on a Singer 15 some years ago. There are areas where the shellac was completely gone and I had to do repeated applications to get any results and it never looked right. The places where the shellac had worn off just don't look right. To me it was a bit of a wasted effort. Now, that said, the parts that still had shellac look just great after a wax treatment. One of these days I'll get ambitious and re-do the machine with a coating of shellac..

Very nice. Free is such a great price if they are nice. It's not bad if they aren't but always a bit of a disappointment when the free machine turns out to be meh.

Wow! Congratulations! What a wonderful find! I have 2 waiting for me to clean up and possible rewire, and I have three 201 hand cranks that I adore!
Enjoy your "new" machine!

If there's no shellack car wax won't fix it. Nothing except reshellacking will. Its going to be a lot of work to reshellack the machine. It has to come completely apart (no unlike redoing clear coat on a car) to do it correctly. Then when you're done, it has to be put back together. If it was me, I'd wax it and call it good, but I don't have machines for collectibles. I have them to use.

WOW, you found that for FREE? What a great find! So happy for you!