Back when I was refurbishing my Singer 251 industrial straight stitch machine, I noticed that there had been a lot of dried-on oil build-up around the right side of the machine, below this cover plate.
I cleaned it off nicely, and replaced the oil flow window and its gaskets, but I did notice that after using the machine, there would be a bit of oil seeping from the cover plate at the top of the machine. It hadn't occurred to me to pick up a replacement gasket when I'd purchased the other repair parts, and a gasket is small and cheap enough that it would have basically disappeared into the shipping costs that I'd have to pay to get one delivered to me, so I put it off for a bit.
But, it just so happened that I was ordering some other sewing machine parts, so...
Let's do this.
The cover comes off with four screws, revealing what could quite possibly be the original 65 year old gasket.
A quick sanity check to make sure we've got the right part.
Never mind that I'm holding it upside-down, it's definitely a match.
The old gasket has flattened out considerably over the years, and adhered itself to the cast iron body of the machine. Luckily, we have ways of dealing with this.
I will commend it for putting up a decent fight.
The majority of the gasket yielded to the putty knife, but it left some crumbs behind that would interfere with the new gasket forming a proper seal.
But the razor scraper made quick work of that.
So we just pop the new gasket in place.
And we're good to go.
Hopefully without any more inconvenient oil seepage.
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