So this followed me home.
What can I say, it was free.
Anyway, what we have here is a Singer 251-2 industrial sewing machine.
The 251 is a straight stitch single needle drop feed machine, and the -2 indicates it was equipped from the factory with the needle plate and feed dogs for medium weight fabrics, though those are pretty easy to swap out and, as we'll see later, probably were.
It's also a touch dirty, but this is to be expected for a machine that's been in service since 1956.
It's also had a few... interesting modifications, let's say, during its lifetime.
Yes, that is a 240v10a plug, with the ground lug snapped off and the blades twisted to fit into a 120v15a outlet. Oddly, even though the switch box is specced for 240v, the motor is a 120v unit. I expect it was probably swapped out at one point; the original was likely a high speed 3450 RPM 240v unit, whereas the motor that's on there now is a 1750 RPM 120v one.
We'll come back to this plug later. For now, we need to do some cleaning.
Some Simple Green to start with took off a lot of grime, but didn't really touch the old, caked on, dried out oil.
We can at least see the serial number tag a little more clearly, though.
And experimenting with dissolving the old oil with isopropyl alcohol showed some signs of success, but I got worried about it possibly dissolving the paint as well so I didn't push my luck.
Not all hope is lost, though. We'll revisit this grime situation later. For now, though, we have more things to deal with, which will continue in the next blog post.
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