Warning on Vintage Brother Machines!!!
 

This warning isn't about the all metal, Japanese made machines from Brother in the 50's to early 70's, but is about Brother machines from the late 70's early 80's that have 80% metal insides and mostly metal bodies, but a huge amount of nylon parts. So far, I've had 4 different Brother machines from that time frame and out of the 4, ALL of them have had broken cam stacks and gears and are unrepairable. Parts are either NLA or simply way too costly to buy. I've not seen a Brother machine from these lines that haven't been parts machines.

I had a friend call me a few weeks ago who wanted to sell me "what she thought was an old Pfaff". I went over and it was a Brother Boutique. Kind of cute, with pink accents, but I knew from my past experience to look under the hood! And sure enough this is what I found. The broken/cracked gears are marked. The fork is even nylon and is also stress fractured. It can't even sew a straight stitch in the current state. My friend handed off the machine to me as a parts machine and I spend part of the day taking it apart. I thought I'd post some photos of what's under the hood on these models.

So far I've seen this on the Pacesetter, Boutique and Galaxie models. I'm sure there are more.

Be sure to test sew any Brother machines you may be interested in and look under the top or pass on them completely. Way too many breaking points on these machines and not worth saving, IMO.

Yikes! Thank you for the warning and photos.

I agree.

CD In Oklahoma

Thanks for the warning. I see grease on the nylon gears. Should nylon gears be greased? I think I've read here not to but I want to be sure.
Thanks,
Rodney

I try not to grease nylon gears. But, as you see, there are times you will get machines that have been already greased .

Thanks, I'll have to go check under the hood on my one Brother, there is no hood to pop up, so it will be challenging[ATTACH=CONFIG]454861[/ATTACH]
The chocolate colored area on top, doesn't open. Amazingly, it runs perfect, maybe because noone ever adjusted or repaired it :D

My Singer 498 has nylon gears and manual said to grease 'em (which I do).
EDIT: Here's the info from the manual (for flat bed version, 478)
[ATTACH=CONFIG]454869[/ATTACH]

Jim,

The top does come off. There is either screws down through the top, or spring catches or tab on the right with a screw on the left. I can't see the top of your machine.

My Ideal Automatik ( made of a Japanese casting, in The Republic of Ireland, for the German market is almost a twin for you machine. Except it uses cams.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]454909[/ATTACH]

Joe

The OSMG that worked on my 403 back in the day (like 2 years ago ;)) told me when I said as thinking of starting to fix vintage machines to stay away from Brother machines. New and old (he didn't specify the vintage, and I automatically rule out the 50-60s machines from this statement) he said they more often than not have broken gears right from the factory. He said he'd opened boxes straight off the shelf and found broken gears.

The Galaxie 221A I had here looked like the nylon gear had been split by the rivetting stage. It still sewed lovely duckies, but I couldn't sell it in good conscience.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]454922[/ATTACH]

I didn't differentiate a lot for the first 18 months, and took any machine that came across my desk to learn. I had a lot of Brother machines to dispose of because of broken gears. Now I won't take them at all, unless I can salvage pedals etc from them and I always tell people they're parts only if they want to "sell" one to me.

Thanks for the heads up.

I've never really gone for Brother machines, and it looks like I never will.