I used a pencil eraser.
I described it here last year:
http://www.archaicarcane.com/what-a-pile-of/

Archaic-- I love your way of explaining things...especially the "from personal experience" angle.

Yet this time I think I'm going with buying a new foot pedal. I've rebuilt one too many FW's and now thinking I'd much rather sew than rebuild. Thanks for the tear-down lesson, I may get my DH to work on this for me.

Julie

From what I have found ( not that much compared to some ) Singer foot controllers are rated at around 1.0 ± amp. I just picked up two 158- Series Kenmores that have 1.2 amp rated foot controllers. I'm going to have to replace the wiring on one due to rodents gnawing on the cords. But before I do that I'm gonna check my LSMG to see if he has a complete cord set up. If so I'll use the extra controller on one of the machines that the foot pedal gets hot just to see how much different it works.
Or maybe the Kenmores will answer the question themselves.

Joe

Tammi,

Thanks for all your trouble. Now I have some instructions to go by when I work these things over.
I've got a couple of them with the "sudden WOT" syndrome and some that won't go fast to save their souls. But thankfully most of them work OK.
Now, do you have any tutorials on how to work on and adjust the old Mercury type foot controllers?????

Joe

I'm glad you enjoyed it. :) It's probably one of my 3 most viewed articles on the site.

Technically, you don't have to go through and do all the disks, you can probably get away with the adjustment only ( http://www.archaicarcane.com/singerattheraces/ ) . It takes me about 30 mins to do the whole adjustment and disk cleaning, sitting in front of a tv show to do it.

I totally get why you'd want to sew instead of tweak though. I don't really get any sewing done lately.

The Kenmore pedals I've opened had 3 wires in them, all black, so you may have a date with a multimeter coming.

Hey Joe,

Use the link I posted for Julie above too for dismantelling and adjustment. The one on the FW I picked up last month had been adjusted to probably almost as far as it could go inside the ceramic. It's the one that tried to light on fire while I viewed it.

The "won't go fast" ones may need the little metal tabs (I mentioned them in that link above for Julie) bent down a little, or the plate that shorts to them may be too low, so it can't short. I think that's what I've found in the past on the slow and steady ones.

I don't think I have any of the mercury controllers here. Can you post a pic of one? Most of mine are carbon pile (Singer and a few of the Japanese ones), solid state (Singer) or electronic (Singer and aftermarket).