1936 Singer Model 128 V.S. manual sewing-machine

A Singer V.S. Model 128 Manual Sewing Machine

This beautiful pre-war gem, dating from 1936, was mine for just fifteen quid at the Camden Lock Market in London. A steal. Really a steal. It’s less than $25AUD. I don’t know many other places apart from London where you can find such nice deals on vintage sewing-machines, or on vintage and antique anythings, really. Certainly I’ve never seen such a deal happen in Australia. Not unless you’re supremely lucky.

The Singer Model 28-series was a Vibrating Shuttle (Abbrev.: “V.S.”) machine. The Vibrating Shuttle mechanism was essentially the second generation of sewing-machine mechanisms, and was one-up on the earlier and less effective Transverse Shuttle (“T.S.”) sewing-machines. This posting will look into the various features of this machine, such as they are…

What Was the Model 28?

The Model 28 and its variants (128, 28k, 27, etc, etc, etc) was one of Singer’s most popular domestic sewing-machines. Mechanically simple and easy to use, the Model 28 was capable of producing neater stitches at a faster and more consistent rate. Because of this, it was manufactured all the way from the 1880s up into the 1930s.

What is a Vibrating Shuttle?

Early lock-stitch sewing-machines operated by using a long, barbell-shaped bobbin inside of a small, shiny, bullet-shaped thing…called a shuttle. How the shuttle (and hence, the bobbin) interacted with the machine determined the model-name.

Transverse (“T.S.”) Shuttle machines worked by having the needle punch through the cloth and pull up. The cloth moved back and the shuttle traversed (moved across) the bed of the sewing-machine, behind the needle-plate, underneath the machine, from left to right. The sharp point or nose of the shuttle (the bullet-shaped end) went through the loop of thread made by the needle, and pulled the bobbin thread through after it. Then, the shuttle slid back across the machine, from right to left, a second before the take-up-lever pulled the stitch tight and the feed-dogs shoved the cloth along, ready for the next stitch. A machine typical of the T.S. system is the Singer Model 12 “Fiddleback” from the mid-1800s:

The photo of this beautiful Singer 12 comes from ISMACS, the International Sewing MAchine Collector’s Society

This is ingenious, but at the same time, inefficient. To improve efficiency, the V.S. was created.

Exactly why it’s called a “Vibrating” shuttle is a mystery…not only to me, but it seems…to every other person who’s written about this subject, who’s writing I’ve read. It doesn’t vibrate at all! It swings!

The V.S. swings back and forth to make each stitch. The shuttle with its bobbin inside, sits in a small carriage that moves back and forth in a semi-circular motion, with each forward motion catching the loop of thread and pulling the bobbin-thread through it, and every backwards motion pulling the stitch tight.

If anyone ever asks you how a sewing-machine works, I think the best working example you could find is a V.S.

An Examination of Crank-Machines

As you may notice on this machine, it’s crank-operated…

This machine dates from 1936, by which time, the first generation electric sewing-machines had entered into the market. Why then, does it have a crank?

Singer produced manual, crank-operated sewing-machines for a hundred years, believe it or not. They were still making brand-new crank-machines as recently as the 1950s! Why you might ask, would a sewing-machine produced in an era of radio, electric lights, talking pictures, record-players and 1st-generation telvisions, still be made with a crank?

A number of reasons.

– Unreliable power-supply.

It wasn’t until the mid-1930s in Britain that there was a unified, nationwide electrical power-grid. Prior to about 1935, every town and city in England had their own separate power-stations, producing different voltages of electricity. What might be enough to power a radio or a light in one town or county, might be too much in another, or too little somewhere else. With this lack of uniformity, it wasn’t possible, or practical, to produce one electronic machine for the whole nation to use, since it would have to be adapted and altered to suit every single separate power-grid in the U.K.

So to overcome this, machines were made to be as independent of the power-grid as possible. This wasn’t just sewing-machines, but other things – typewriters, radios (which ran on batteries), and even stoves (which would run on gas, instead of electric hotplates).

– Spare Parts

In a way, Singer (as with many other products of the day) were victims of their own success. As anyone else who tinkers with these things will surely testify to, a vintage sewing-machine is built to be indestructible. Nothing short of a nuclear explosion will even put a dent into these machines. And because of this, the old cranks on machines, as well as the machines themselves, rarely broke down. As a result, any spare parts (such as cranks) which were produced, were not often sold to already-existing machines. So to prevent wastage, they simply went on making crank-machines.

– Rationing

This machine was built just three years before the outbreak of the Second World War. When the war started, and Singer’s factory in Scotland wasn’t able to produce any more modern sewing-machines with electric motors, they reverted back to the older, more reliable and less grid-dependent crank-machines. They were easier to build, and if the power went out thanks to a German air-raid, you could keep on sewing. And sewing was important during the war – with few clothes and fabric being strictly rationed for the war-effort, housewives, dressmakers and tailors had to be incredibly skilled with a sewing-machine to make every swatch of cloth count and not waste anything.

– Portability

The crank-driven sewing-machine is the ultimate portable sewing-machine. Treadle sewing-machines are strictly stationery objects. Electric machines can only go as far as the cord will allow you. But a crank-operated Singer can be taken literally anywhere, and still work flawlessly, without being reliant on anything other than the strength of the operator’s right arm (to turn the handle!)

On the famous ghost ship, the Mary Celeste, an posting about which, may be found on this blog, the captain’s wife, Mrs. Briggs, brought her sewing-machine with her when she joined her husband on his latest voyage. It was almost certainly a hand-cranked model, a treadle-machine being too bulky and heavy to carry onboard a sailing-ship. Most likely, it was a Singer 12, the most common model of the time (the Mary Celeste set sail in 1872, the Model 12 came out in 1865).

A Look at the Mechanics

Hand-crank machines worked very simply. They operated no differently from comparable treadle, or even electric machines. It was just a different method of doing the same job.

If you’ve ever looked at the side of an old sewing-machine, you may notice a hole underneath the balance-wheel. This hole is where the crank-assembly is bolted onto the machine (or in later models, where the sewing-motor is bolted on). The crank works by the arm of the crank fitting between the spokes of the balance-wheel (if your machine has a solid balance-wheel, then you can change it to a spoked one if you want it to be a manual machine) and turning the wheel.

The cogwheels on the crank-assembly work in a ratio of 1:3. One turn of the crank-handle turns the big wheel one revolution.

One revolution of the big wheel produces three revolutions of the small one.

Three turns of the small wheel turns the arm three times, which turns the balance wheel three times (and therefore, produces three stitches).

Given the size of the machines and how compact everything had to be, it’s not a bad power-ratio.

Hand-crank machines such as this one were popular for their compactness, ease of use and their portability. The tradeoff was that you had to use more muscle-power to run the machine, but on the other hand, you could take this places that your treadle, or even your electric machine, could never go.