Singer sewing machine

My current apartment is located a couple of blocks from a sewing machine/vacuum cleaner place, so I've taken apart a disproportionate number of sewing machines over the last year. I was snagging one or two every week for a while. However, they don't seem to be throwing out very many recently. That's just as well, I suppose, because they generally aren't the most interesting things to disassemble. Oh, they've got a lot of interesting moving parts inside, but those assemblies usually won't come apart with the limited tools I have, so I'm limited to whatever is on the outside (knobs, dials, controls, etc.). Relative to other appliances that I've run across, sewing machines seem to have a wider range of disassemblability (It's a word because I say it is); some I can barely remove anything beyond the knobs, and others I can get a lot further into.

This Singer falls in that first category. Hell, I couldn't even get that big control dial all the way off, just the inner knob.

See all those mechanical goodies inside? They had to stay there because those screws were on too tight for me to budge. It makes me wonder if the repair shop had the same issues and just decided it wasn't worth the effort to repair.


These are the few pieces I kept from this machine. I like to take a few trophies off of everything I take apart, partly as mementos (I've been doing this since I was a kid, but only recently started taking pictures), but mostly as parts for projects I keep telling myself I'll build one day. Most of these hypothetical projects are of the found-object sculpture variety, but I keep more universal components like wirecaps and nuts and bolts for more practical repair jobs.