Singer 301

A new month, a "new" machine!

As I finished up the Rocketeer's cleaning/oiling in preparation for putting them back on their shelf, I pulled out the 301 that's been waiting patiently on the floor in one of the bedroom closets.

Oh, she's grimy!

I was afraid the finish on the bed was marred. Turns out it was only kitty litter dust.

 

This tin has been hanging out with the rest of the parts boxes . . .

. . . and I knew it contained the 301 goodies.

The two wood screws in the upper left may seem out of place in that tin, but I knew exactly what they were for and whence they came. This machine came with a table but when it was dismantled for moving, the table brace was removed from the table instead of from the machine. (When one is unfamiliar with the mechanics of something, one takes the obvious/simplest solution and removes two screws instead of wrestling with clamps and levers and awkward positions.)

The table was lurking about in another closet and I wasn't terribly inspired to drag it out yet.

I did, however, remove the brace from the machine. I gave it a quick wash in the sink and will reattach it to the table when it's dry.

Some wiping down with lightly-soapy water, some buffing with 0000 steel wool (mainly to scrape off years of built-up plastic residue on the hand wheel), and some scraping with toothpicks at some of the built-up oil spots took care of the surface schmutz. Next stop: all the lint traps, starting with the bobbin area.

The two rectangular pieces at the top of the picture are attached to the bottom of the needle plate and keep the bobbin case locked in position.

It was obvious I'd need to find something more aggressive than a lint brush or a toothpick, so I grabbed some needle-nosed pliers from my toolkit. While rummaging through the 'little bits & bobs' box within the toolkit, I discovered this handy little tool.

I've no idea where/when I got it, but it's wonderful for scraping as well as probing. Gotta love a nice-sized handle, too!

I pulled out all the lint I could reach from the bobbin area (wishing I could remove the case altogether, but couldn't) and managed to get a bit more when I removed the needle plate (witnessing why some owners thought they needed to replace the 'felt pad' around the feed dogs when they did periodic maintenance on their machines). It wasn't until I revealed the undercarriage could I get to the rest of the lint and threads jammed into and caught around the machinery. Great wodges of crap were cleared out!

After oil was dropped in/on the recommended places and grease applied to the gears, I tackled the tension assembly. With an illustration like this at hand (from the owner's manual), it seemed fool-proof!

Reality laughs at fools.

The first step to removing all the parts is to turn the tension knob to zero. However, when I turned the dial, the entire assembly, from the -|+ collar to the knob, rotated.

What I ended up doing was inserting a screwdriver into the middle slot, holding everything still while I used some pliers to turn the knob. Once the knob was loosened, everything came off just like the illustration.

Reassembly took an hour or three, due to three parts: E, G, and J (in that order).

E was mangled, its little hook squished out of position. My attempt to straighten it resulted in the hook breaking off, as I suspected it would. However, I have a boat anchor I can turn to for extra parts . . .

. . . and it supplied another piece E. 

Following the instructions step by step, it should have been a quick job getting everything reassembled. But it wasn't. I couldn't seem to get the knob lined up correctly (it kept cross-threading) and even when I did get it on and everything securely in place, the tension spring (T) kept getting caught. I spent way too much time straightening that out too before it finally occurred to me that I had put piece G on backwards. Instead of supplying a cup into which everything nestled, I had made it into a cap on which everything was stacked. DUH!!! 

By the time of this revelation I was saturated with knowledge of how every little piece went together (and hobbled by a hand that kept cramping), which came in handy when it came time to sew. The tensions seemed to work well together, the stitch length was great, and everything purred. However, whenever I tried to remove what I was stitching, the thread would snap at the needle. After the third time I traced the problem to the tension assembly. The disks weren't separating when the foot was lifted--the tension remained as tight as it was while sewing.

Piece J was the culprit. It's a free-floating piece and easy to remove (once the tension assembly is taken apart, again). I could see it had either worn down or an end had sheared off (the black one).

An old finishing nail had the right diameter so I cut it down to a length slightly longer than the existing piece J. After disassembling/assembling everything three (four?) more times, I finally had the new J nibbled to the right size. It only needed to be a silly millimeter longer ("101!")(who has that jingle running through their heads now?)

What happens is that when the presser foot is raised, piece J (that little white bit in the teal circle) is pushed in to the right. It, in turn, pushes against the bar in the middle of piece G, pushing G away from the tension disks, loosing the tension on the thread.

When the presser foot is lowered, the big spring in the middle of the tension assembly applies pressure back onto the disks and J is also pushed back to the left and away from everything. 

The 301 is set up in my studio and ready to go now. I eventually had to get her table out of the closet to extract the foot pedal and power cord. The table has a clamp along one side to put the pedal in, with a knee lever for foot-free sewing. 

She's got an accurate 1/4" line on the needle plate and I'm looking forward to playing on her for the rest of the month. Finding additional bobbins might be a challenge, as hers are much shallower than any of the ones I've used before. I haven't checked my baggie of random bobbins yet. Maybe I'll get lucky!