About decals...?
 

I can't find an answer in my research...can you sand off and replace the decals on a vintage machine without repainting the whole bed? I am hopefully going to be adding a featherweight to my herd of machines, but her decals are pretty bad on the bed of the machine but the rest of it looks pretty good. Not sure that I would do anything at all except a little spit and polish but want to know what's possible...

I"m not sure, most of my experience comes from painting show cars, but I would think that by the time you sanded off the decals you would have also sanded off the clear coat and maybe some of the paint. So my guess would be no. To have it look really good, you'd have to repaint the bed.

If you read through Glenn's "Cleaning and repairing the Shellac clear coat" thread (third one down on the Vintage main page) he speaks about what you need to do to keep from accidentally taking the decals off... which means that he's also alluding to the exact sort of things that will take the decals off. Fortunately, the shellac was applied on top of the decals, and the decals applied on top of the Japaning (the black paint). One should theoretically be able to remove the top coat shellac and then the decals without damaging the paint underneath. In my mind, the tricky part might be what to use as a protective coating over new decals.