Singer 99 conversion to hand crank, bobbin winder option.

I won a nice little Singer 99 in the raffle at the NC TOGA last June.  Afterwards Maria told me that she had donated it.  Thanks, Maria!

She had obviously spent some time cleaning it up and there was very little left for me to do.  It needed a new bobbin cover slide plate, and I had one in the stash.













Note:  I wrote a tutorial for hand crank conversion back in 2012 so take a look if you want more details about the process.

screwdriver points to location of missing screw

It also needed an attachment screw for the bobbin winder.  But this proved to be a blessing in disguise.

One of the problems of converting machines to hand crank status is whether the bobbin winder will work once the conversion is finished.

You have to replace the original solid hand wheel on the 99 and the 185 with a spoked wheel.  The hand crank has a finger that fits into the space between the spokes.




The spoked wheel is a different diameter than the solid wheel and this leaves the bobbin winder dangling in mid-air with no place to land.  But with this screw missing you can just push the winder into position to make contact with the spoked hand wheel.

I didn't invent this, btw.  I am sure I read this somewhere, probably on TreadleOn, possibly from Maria!  But I had forgotten about it until I started playing around with this machine.






Beautiful nose plate and nice and clean inside the nose.  "Nose" is what I call it because I never remember what it is really supposed to be called.

Nice and clean underneath.

Ditto for the bobbin area. There is a bit of rust (not nearly as bad as the photo shows) but everything turns freely.  It just needed a replacement bit of felt tucked into that little spring on the side.  Oil goes on the felt, and then a thin film of oil is continuously added to the bobbin race as it races around the track.




The original felt inside the little spring thingy was a red wool felt.  You can cut a piece the right size off of a red spool pin felt and use that.  The spool pin felts I have bought from sew-classic.com are wool.  If you get them elsewhere I can't promise their wool-ness.

It is easier than you might think to dis- and re-assemble the bobbin area of the Singer 99 and its big sister the 66.  I found thorough directions with photos at the Tools for Self Reliance website.
They cover all aspects of refurbishing the 99, 16, 15 and 201.  The vintage sewing machine world is in a blind panic now because they have taken the directions off of their website.  Apparently there is a way to travel back in time (internet-wise) to retrieve them.  I have them downloaded fortunately.  People have been writing to them asking them to restore the directions.  So far no go though.

This is the Singer 99 that eventually became Nellie's pink machine.  I can never get enough pictures of it, how about you?

I probably started writing this post a year ago or more!  The machine has long been finished and delivered to little Nellie.  But the info about the bobbin winder "adjustment" is important and the fix is so easy that I knew I really had to get this posted eventually.  So here it is.

Enjoy the advent of Spring (or Fall if you are in the southern hemisphere.  Or the rainy season if you are in the tropics and waiting for it).

Paper Towel Holders and a Not-Vintage Pfaff

As mentioned here before (and often) I am a thrift store junkie.  It is just so much fun to look at all the old trash treasures.

One of my all time great finds was a cast iron paper towel holder, enameled pink.  It has a finial at the top that has holes in it.  I realized its potential immediately.

It was designed so that you can unscrew the finial, pop a roll of paper towels on, and replace the finial.  The finial keeps the paper towels from leaping up off of the post and escaping.  Like they do.

The smaller post on the side is designed to keep the paper towels under control.  But you can also put a cone of thread on it, and run the thread up through the finial.  Cutest thread stand EVER.

Uh, well, at least until the one shown below came along.  And dear readers, it was many, many years between the discovery of the pink one and the arrival of this lovely.  So don't expect to pop into your local charity shop and just pick one up.

It is wood rather than cast iron, but is performing well.  It is marked "Fiesta" on the bottom and yes, that is an adorable Fiesta-looking teapot on top of the finial.  The thread feeds through the handle of the teapot.

This is the official microwave quilting station.  Literally two steps around the corner from the microwave.  During the couple of minutes it takes for leftovers to heat up I can get a tidy amount of chain piecing done.  And that is my favorite quilt-block-piecing-machine, a made-by-Toyota 15 clone.

Ignore that silly green thing in the middle.  It was supposed to be a thread stand and it came from an online sewing supplies store (NOT Jenny).  It was an un-usable piece of junk.  I would say that it fell apart except for the fact that it was never together and it was physically impossible to put it together and have it stay together.  So I used JB Weld, and modeled it on the paper towel holder.  WRONG.  The little post for the thread was supposed to be in the middle, with the thread guide on the side.  It worked though.  I have given it away since acquiring the Fiesta teapot one.

The pink one lives down in the studio with my latest wild passionate love interest (I'm the passionate one.  I don't think the Pfaff really feels any emotion).


Introducing:  Pfaff Creative 7510

Here's what exhaustive research 5 minutes of Googling tells me about this machine.  Made in 1994 (or thereabouts, I'm doing this from my unreliable memory now), and one of the last models made in Germany.  Extremely well reviewed.  I haven't discovered what it cost when new--leave a comment if you know.  But the day I bought it I discovered two different online sewing machine stores that were selling them for $1200.  $1200.  Right now.

So what did I pay for it, you are dying to know, right?

$5.00

Five US dollars.  With the original manual and a set of presser feet.

It was sitting on the floor of one of my favorite charity shops.  I'm not really interested in modern machines, but I look at ALL the machines.  No power cord, motor controller (aka foot pedal), or manual was present--or at least that's what the sneaky machine led us to believe. My favorite cashier Miss Maggie looked it over too.  The reason it was $5 was the missing power cord and pedal.  I figured a Pfaff for $5 was worth a chance at least.

Popped it into the back of my truck and by the time I got home the road vibrations had popped open the "secret" compartment in the cover.  And there were the missing cord, pedal, and manual.

I know y'all are vintage folk, so I'm not going to tell you about all its marvelous features like the fact it tells you when the bobbin is going to run out. Or any of the other nonessential whiz bang features that modern machines have. I'm not going to drool over the joy of stitching on it.

UPDATE:  OMG I totally forgot to NOT tell you about the awesome dual feed.  Thanks for the reminder Angie!  It's a built in walking foot but way better.  Better because you can use many different presser feet with it.

And I'm not going to describe all of the decorative stitches that you can make up to 9 mm wide.  9 mm!!!  My vintage flat cam Singers will do a dainty 5 mm and my modern (2005) Janome will do 7 mm.  And I absolutely love decorative stitches.

apron ties

9 mm, yum.  Shown on a one inch grid in case you are an American and don't have a clue how big 9 millimeters is.  (says this American who, after a 25 years of teaching earth science at a major university, still can't mentally translate Fahrenheit to Celsius.  Which I still think of as Centigrade).

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So dear readers, are you using any non-traditional devices for thread holding?  Tell us in the comments below.