Tuesday, 18 April 2017

Peerless buttonholer

The Peerless company were (I believe) the first to come up with an attachment for straight stitch sewing machines which would enable the machine to make a buttonhole.  They did this in the 1880s, and I bought one of these first ones a couple of years ago. Today, I disassembled it, cleaned it, reassembled it and eventually got everything working. There was some rust, for which I can forgive the almost 130-year-old attachment.
Peerless "Singer V.S.." on late '50s 201K treadle
They're ingenious devices, and have adjustments for stitch width, stitch length and distance between the two lines of stitches.
After getting it to work I quickly got out the video camera and made a video. A tweak here and there would have been more sensible, as the resulting work was a bit sub-standard.
The video is here.
Afterwards, I set the machine up properly. The feed cover is essential even though the 201 can drop the feed dog. I removed it to see what would happen and it wasn't good.
Following are the pictures of a 'good' one, but still a bit lacking. The mechanism is a little loose, likely through wear, and this would make it just about impossible to get a perfectly straight line of stitching. Still, they're very rare and it works after all this time.

Top of buttonhole
Underneath of buttonhole