Yes, "Polishing My Sewing Machine" Probably IS a Euphemism...

[sakon76]

So the sewing machine has a round silver plate on its back. It looked a little like this:



Fairly horrifying, no? Once I'd gotten it off the machine, I soaked it in Evapo-Rust, which made it look like this:



Which, to be honest, looks kind of like the opposite of progress. Yes, the red rust is gone, but the black is even more visible!

Still, forging bravely onward, I pulled out the Maas Metal Polish (French lavendar scented! ooh. ahh.) and had at it over a couple of evenings, which ended me up with this:



Much improved, no? I intend to spent a few more evenings rubbing at it with the polish and some cut-up t-shirts to see if I can get the rest of that black gone.

The 15's faceplate, in comparison, was never quite so bad:



This was when I was disassembling the tension mechanism prior to the Evapo-Rust soak. A little light rust on the right side and that was about it. The tension discs, as you can plainly see, were in much worse shape than the plate itself. The post-soak post-polishing pic looks a little like this:



Much better, no?

Comments

[tainry.livejournal.com]

Wow! Love the detail/design on them. Too bad nothing like that gets done on modern equipment.

I've obviously put too much thought into this subject...

[sakon76.livejournal.com]

Modern sewing machines are made of plastic and designed, like pretty much all modern appliances, with planned obsolescence in mind. Disposable machines don't really have to be pretty. Vintage sewing machines, OTOH, up until sometime in the sixties, were made of metal (mostly cast iron, but there are some portable aluminum ones as well) with the premise that they should last and you should be able to fix them yourself. And if you're going to be sewing on something for decades, it should be pretty to look at, no?

Of course, there has also been an accompanying cultural shift. In the olden days, yard goods were a good deal cheaper than ready-made clothing, so it was a given that the women of a household would make all its clothing. These days, store-bought clothing is cheap, and good yardage not, so home sewing has been reduced to a hobby rather than a necessity. Clothing is also much plainer now; fewer tucks and ruffles and gathers. Sewing machines don't take the heavy load they used to; they don't have to be as sturdy.

That said, the old machines were also proportionately a good deal more expensive. My two white plastic modern machines cost about a hundred each. The cost of old machines, adjusted for inflation, would have been in the thousands. The Singer Manufacturing Company literally invented installment payment plans... ^_^