Assessment/thought process while acquiring my latest sewing machine

I wrote this post out on tumblr because I've been getting a lot of questions about machines and I thought it might perhaps be a bit helpful and/or interesting for some people, and then I figured I ought to post it here too.

This past Saturday a friend sends me these 2 pics from a yard sale and asks if I'm interested:

Intriguing! Grubby, but I don't see any missing pieces. Two access plates present and accounted for and no gaping holes, good, good. (I'd never heard of Western Electric and I do some quick googling at this point, but it doesn't really affect my choice here.)

It's grainy but I can see the bobbin winder complete with a cam and a little arm that guides thread back and fourth. Behind that the stitch length regulator knob is just visible.

The foot and needle clamp and both sliding plates are there, and the tension assembly looks alright, I can see the little knob at the end of it.

Clearly a vibrating shuttle machine from the orientation of the plates, so hopefully it has bobbins, because those could be hard to find.

Asked friend how much it is and he said $25. (CAD) An agreeable price for a sad old machine!
Hmm, I think. Maybe I can find a hand crank for it, but even if the machine is a total loss, the case would be well worth the price. It's got an intact bentwood lid! None of my current machines have one of those.

The bottom part looks scuffed up, but not warped or falling apart or mouldy as far as I can see in the pictures.

I figure that in the worst case scenario (or. worst machine scenario?) I could remove this machine and somehow alter the hole size to fit one of my two currently case-less machines.

If, at this point, I had wanted to be more sure of the machine itself before buying it I would have asked the friend to:

1. Turn the hand wheel to see if it moves. If it turns, even stiffly, that's good. If it's frozen completely solid then that's pretty bad. (Not necessarily impossible to save, but I've never encountered a seized machine before and I don't know if I'd be able to fix it with my limited tools.)
2. Check to see if there's a shuttle in there, and at least one bobbin. Can't sew at all without those. I probably would have described them as "a little bullet shaped thingy and a little dumbell thingy" and told him to look in the storage compartment on the right side of the case, and under the front sliding plate.

But, having determined the case at the very least was worth having, I say yes. Friend buys it and drives it over and I e-transfer him the $25.
Now I can look at the machine in person! Whee!

Case lid latches securely to the base, good! The handle is rusty but it's screwed on, not riveted, so I'll be able to remove it and take all that rust off.

Yep, still looks like no missing parts. Except for the cord and foot pedal, but I wasn't going to even attempt to use the 100+ year old motor anyways.

(The cover of the storage compartment is missing its knob, but that's easy to fix, and not something that needs to be specific like the actual machine parts.)

The wheel turns fairly smoothly and things appear to be moving as they should. There's dirt and oily gunk, but I can clean that. There are patches of rust here and there, but nothing too huge, and I can sand and polish it off.

I look under the front plate and hooray, there's the shuttle and it's got a bobbin in it!

I slide back the lid of the storage compartment and there's another bobbin, and 3 feet and a quilting guide and a seam guide! (And 4 flaky lead weights that have no business being here, ick.)

No sign of any needles though, which is a bit of a bummer, but there is the rusty stump of a broken one still in the needle clamp.

At this point I've read a bit more on the internet, and I see posts saying that Western Electric made the motors and sold machines branded with their name, but the machines themselves were made by the National Sewing Machine Company. Good to know! I look at some pictures of National sewing machines and some of them are almost the exact same design as this one. Apparently mine's from the 10's or 20's, which seems right judging from the overall style.

They seem to be not super common and also not particularly valuable, but I really don't care as long as it sews.

I look around for National Sewing Machine Company hand cranks and find only one, which is on ebay.

Same manufacturer and same time period, and it's a bit hard to tell from the angle but the mounting part looks like the same size and shape as the flat part on my machine...

But I should find out if anything's wrong with the workings of the machine before I consider buying a rare and expensive hand crank. Normally I just start the disassembly and cleaning before bothering to find out, but in this case I'd better test it right now.

I drop a little oil here and there, but I don't bother to do all the necessary points because it'll all be cleaned anyways and I just need to see if it makes a stitch. I take the rusty needle stump out and it's got the same kind of shank as a standard needle! I try a standard needle and it's too short to catch the tip of a shuttle (very easy to see it doing this if you move the hand wheel without the plate or fabric in the way) but I move it a few mm lower in the clamp and it stitches fine! The upper tension needed to be tightened a lot but that was all.

Someone in a forum post I saw did mention that these machines used a needle that's similar to a standard needle but a bit longer. When I clean & reassemble it I can either move the needle bar a bit lower, or glue a little nub of something in there to stop the needle from going all the way up. I'll probably do the former.

I used the old thread already on the bobbin, so I still haven't tested the bobbin winder, but it spins and looks totally fine. I'll have to replace the crusty old tire and then it should work.
Working machine with 2 bobbins, I will not be wasting my money if I buy a hand crank that fits it.

I want to be more certain that the crank will fit, so I message the seller and ask how far apart the 2 holes are, and how big the flat part is.

I also find this image from a National Sewing Machine advertisement. Oohooo!

Aside from the extra spool pin that looks just like my machine, and the hand crank has the same shape and decals as the ebay one!

The ebay seller messages back with the measurement between the middle of the 2 holes, and the width of the flat part, and it's the same measurements as mine! I also have a closer squint at the pictures and it looks like the spinning part that attaches to the wheel is to one side and the mounting part is to the other side, and the corresponding places on my machine are in the same orientation. I also find a slit in the hand wheel that looks just the right with for that little metal tab with the hole in it.
I am now 99% sure the crank will fit, so I order it. Thankfully it's in BC, so there's no international shipping. The crank itself was $85, but all things considered I think it's a fair price for a rare highly specific over 100 year old piece of equipment. (As of the time I'm writing this it's only just shipped and should be here in a couple of weeks.)

Edit: It's here! I haven't bolted it all the way on, but it fits and should work just fine once the machine is all cleaned up!

I take the machine out of the case and look at the bottom, and there's a very dead sheet of thin plywood. Moisture has happened to it.

I have a scrap of thin plywood that's just a bit bigger than this, and the rest of the case is not too bad. Some cracks in the bottom to glue, and some chips of missing veneer, but this is fixable.

A good purchase! Things are going exceedingly well!! I've never used a hand crank but I've wanted one for a while, ever since I realized how precise they'd be for free motion embroidery.

I have just started on refurbishing the case, but I'll do another blog post about that when it's done, this one was just about the figuring stuff out & buying stage.

A Singer 14U557 Serger Repair

 Last year I got a serger for free. It came with no manual, no needles, and the wrong brand name on it. I had a very frustrating time making it work again so I thought I'd make a blog post about it.

The reason it was free is that it was on the backroom shelf in the shop where I work (I do suit alterations) and the manager was doing some decluttering and said I could take it. We already have a perfectly good industrial serger there that practically never gets used, so there was no reason to have a broken domestic one as well.

My first problem with it was that I couldn't find anything about it online. Not a sniff of a "Reliable Millennium Series" domestic serger anywhere. (I looked around the shop for serger manuals, but it was nowhere to be found.)

From the "Millennium Series" mark I figured it was from about the year 2000, but I couldn't find any indication that Reliable ever even made domestic sergers. Their website only shows industrial sergers and they never responded to my email.

This is the text on the back of the machine but it was no help.

I made a post on tumblr asking for help, and several commenters said it looked like a rebadged Singer 14U557. And so it did! Hooray! 

I had not heard of "rebadging", but apparently that's a thing that happens sometimes, and would explain why the Reliable label was just a rubbery thing stuck on with weak glue. So I peeled that off. 
I don't know what the point of a rebadged machine is and I think it's quite irritating that anyone would do that.

Knowing what make of machine it was didn't help with my main problem, however, which was that the needle holes are ridiculously tiny.

All my standard needle shanks are miles too big. 

I said it came with no needles, but it did actually have the broken stump of one old needle in there, which my manager unfortunately lost. (This was before I'd taken it home.)
But before he lost it I'd taken it to Fabricville in a little bag and compared it to every machine needle they had, and all were much too big. 

I tried ordering 2 different packs of basic Singer serger needles, even though I was skeptical as the shanks looked large in the pictures, and it turned out they were indeed too large. Alas.

I found a store with a list of Singer 14U557 supplies that included DBx1 needles, and ooh, another website that says the width of their shanks is a mere 1.63 mm! How promising!

I ordered DBx1 needles and they were still too big for my serger's stupid tiny holes.
But at least they fit the industrial machine I use at work, so they won't go to waste.

But then! One wonderful tumblr commenter suggested POx1 needles, which have 1.28 mm shanks!

There were very few sites with them listed, and the only place they were actually in stock and available to buy was Aliexpress, where the minimum one could order was 5 packs. (That was 8 months ago and the listing I bought from isn't showing up anymore, but there are search results for a couple others.)

So I bought the 5 packs, and they fit! Finally!! My goodness are they ever narrow. The shanks are round.

Standard needle on the right for comparison.
(The length difference will prove to be a problem later.)

I put a couple of them in the machine, turned the hand wheel, and the lower looper bumped into the needle. I was not in the mood to deal with that at the moment, so I avoided it for the next 8 months, before getting back to it just a few days ago.

I thought there must be something wrong with the alignment, but after some more messing around I discovered that the looper only bumped into the needle when the presser foot was down, which meant the foot was pushing the needle out of place. (And upon further reflection, an alignment problem probably would not cause a needle-looper collision.)

The cause seemed to be that the joint of the foot was too loose and wiggled from side to side, making one bumpy edge of the foot push into the needle. I tried squeezing the foot with pliers to make the joint tighter, but it wouldn't budge and I don't know how it got so loose in the first place. Instead I simply filed the offending foot bump down a bit.

That took care of the needle collision problem, but when I threaded the serger and tested it it still would not chain. 
(I would like to mention that when testing these solutions I first try it with the hand wheel to make sure nothing is colliding, and then when I try it with power I wear safety goggles just in case a needle breaks.)

Still under the impression that I had an alignment problem, I took off some parts of the plastic exoskeleton. In fact, I took off more parts than I needed to, but I did oil all the joints I could while I was in there so it was ok.

I watched a video on fixing serger timing and was still puzzled at first, because it looked like my loopers were more or less in the correct positions. But then I noticed the needles in the video were much higher than mine.

The highest needle position in the video.

And the highest on mine...

Evidently my needles were too long, which made them too low, which meant they weren't catching the threads they were supposed to on the way down.

Raising the needle bar was easy, as the screw that held it in place was accessible from the side where I'd taken the light cover off, and could be loosened with a small allen key.

But unfortunately I couldn't raise it very much - it only had room to go a few millimetres higher than the original position.

It was still not quite enough, and things still weren't catching properly.

So I figured the only thing left to do was try to shorten the needles. They were a good 5 mm longer than the standard ones, so I marked the difference on with marker and tried both a hacksaw and a metal file on it. Unfortunately both tools had about the same effect, which was practically nothing.

So then I tried snapping the top off the shank with 2 pairs of pliers (while wearing safety goggles of course) and it popped off very easily! Hooray!

Now my needles were high enough! In fact, at first they were a little too high and I had to lower them a smidge. 

Around this time I switched to just using one needle.
It took some more fiddling to get things working right. The tension was all wonky and I'd also threaded one part slightly wrong, but eventually I got it! 

WOOHOOOOOO! FINALLY!!!

I may try re-lowering the needle bar sometime, since it's easier to snap off a longer needle nub than a shorter one, but as long as I position the needles at the right height it's fine this way for now.

I have no idea if, somewhere out there in the vast & confusing world of needle sizes, there's one with the same width but a shorter length, and seeing as I already have 5 packs of these I do not care.

I haven't gotten it to work with 2 needles yet, but I also haven't tried very hard because I don't need 2 needles. The second needle is only really important if you're going to use the serger to sew seams, which I have no intention of ever doing. Much better to finish the edges first and then sew the pieces together.

The blade was extremely dull so I removed it. I may try sharpening it on my oilstone someday, but I don't really think I'll need it. I'll only be using this to finish the edges on cut pieces, and the ends of fabric before washing. As long as I'm careful to cut with nice even seam allowances and put the pieces through the machine at a steady distance from the edge it should be fine. 
Plus, it saves me the trouble of having to get 4 cones of thread instead of 3.

There are a couple of other minor broken bits, but they don't affect the functionality. One of the little tabs that holds the scrap catcher on is broken off, but it still stays in place with just the one, and anyways if I don't have a blade I don't need a catcher.

The inner one is broken, but the end is held in by leaning against the machine.

The presser foot lever also has one of its 2 tabs broken off, but it still works fine. I turned it around to have the non-broken one face the front.

The one thing I would like to change is the thread holder attachment, because it's very unstable. It's held in place by one tiny little brass knob thingy that fits into a hole in the plastic casing, and the slightest bump can knock it off, especially if the thread cones are very uneven sizes. 

I don't want to glue it on permanently, as I think that would be bad for storage and transportation, but it would be nice to have a more secure way of clipping it on. Still, not a super high priority for the moment. As long as it's sitting still on a table it shouldn't fall off during regular use.

All in all, I think this serger will suit my needs perfectly! And I'm very glad it was free, as I've paid for it with time, effort, and needle money. Though all together I probably spent about 100 CAD on various needles, which is still only a fraction of the price that sergers usually are.

For most garments I prefer to line or flat fell the seams, but I like using serged edges for pants and pyjama bottoms. Previously I'd use the industrial at work, which is only threaded with black and which always needs to be un-buried from the stack of boxes covering it. Or I'd use my mother's if I needed a lighter colour, which requires a bus trip across town. So this will be much more convenient!

I hope this blog post may be helpful to anyone who has similar serger troubles.