Friday, April 22, 2011

Getting a replacement belt for the White Featherweight 221

    Determining the birth date of your Featherweight is fairly straight forward but the information you find can be a little misleading as well.
   If you go to; singer.com you will find a "button" that will take you to "Singer support" and from there you go to "machine serial numbers". There were several variations of the serial numbers on Singer sewing machines over the years. The earliest serial numbers for Singer machines were simply six numbers. Then there came a single letter before six numbers, and close on its heals was the double letter with six that Featherweight owners relate to. Select the "Two Letter Prefixes ".
    If the first letter of your Feather's serial number is an "A  your machine was born in Elizabethport, New Jersey, USA. If your serial number is proceeded with an "E" your machine was born at the United Kingdom's Clydebank Scotland site. If you desire to print out all the pages of the Singer serial numbers, even just the single letter serial numbers, you will need a lot of paper in your printer before you begin. I went through a pile of paper and just the twos letter prefix numbers filled a one inch binder.
    Another thing about the serial numbers. When one goes to the Singer web site they will find a very specific date written before the year of the machine's manufacture you are looking up. This date is not the machine's birth date. For production record keeping and production planning a "block" of numbers was set aside on this date shown and thousands of machines were built with numbers in a sequence taken from this block of numbers. The year stated is dead-on, the month/date will be somewhere between the date shown and the date of the next block of numbers having to be set about three months further down the road. The numbers after the prefix can give you a feel for a date by subtracting the first block of serial numbers form the next block of numbers and noting where your serial number fits into that string of numbers, but you cannot come up with an absolute date by day and hour, sorry.