A vin­tage Pfaff 1171 sewing machine

My 25-year-old Pfaff sewing machine is com­ing home from the tune-up shop this week­end. She needed repairs to her presser foot, and adjust­ments to ten­sion and stitch­ing pre­ci­sion. The repair­man also cleaned the mov­ing parts and removed the gunky oil and grease that had caused her to lock up.

These are the prob­lems that occur when a pre­ci­sion mechan­i­cal device is neglected for more than a decade. Now the repair­man says she’s run­ning “like brand new” [sic].

Mechanical versus Electronic?

I was lucky to buy this work­horse sewing machine, right at the tran­si­tion point when lead­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers were flirt­ing with early LCD screens and prim­i­tive soft­ware appli­ca­tions for high-end sewing machines.

Hav­ing spent my career in soft­ware and later at Apple, I was leery about the pit­falls of buy­ing an impor­tant house­hold appli­ance that was utterly depen­dent on early gen­er­a­tion soft­ware — and worse, soft­ware devel­oped by peo­ple who don’t under­stand what it takes to pro­duce (and main­tain) great soft­ware.

To put things in per­spec­tive: the Web had­n’t been invented, the Inter­net was used only by sci­en­tists and aca­d­e­mics, and few peo­ple had email addresses. The Mac had only been around for a few years, and Microsoft had not yet released Win­dows 3.o/3.1 — the ver­sions that cat­a­pulted them into the Big Time. Those were the early days of com­put­ers and soft­ware designed for ordi­nary peo­ple to use…

After exam­in­ing those early mod­els, I could see how poorly those indus­trial-era man­u­fac­tur­ers under­stood the require­ments of soft­ware capa­ble of delight­ing con­sumers for years to come. Unlike the 1990s prod­uct design­ers, my high tech career had taught me the impor­tance of:

• A deep under­stand­ing of usabil­ity, and how must-haves ver­sus nice-to-haves will dif­fer across the var­i­ous seg­ments of peo­ple who use sewing machines
• Use cases and require­ments rel­e­vant to spe­cific cat­e­gories of sewing: e.g., gar­ments ver­sus quilts ver­sus embroi­dery
• Ease of soft­ware updates and bug fixes
• Local­iza­tion of the user inter­face. As it is, the printed man­u­als are hard enough to use, because multi-lin­gual instruc­tions are inter­min­gled — rather than lan­guage-spe­cific sec­tions
• Screen leg­i­bil­ity under the ambi­ent light­ing con­di­tions for home or pro­fes­sional sewing machine users

Despite my ini­tial inter­est in state-of-the-art elec­tronic machines, I opted for the tried-and-true mechan­i­cal approach, where the man­u­fac­tur­ers excelled. My 25-year-old machine relies on push but­ton con­trols, dials and levers to adjust set­tings. It has a “heavy duty build.” There’s no soft­ware to break, or con­troller boards to replace.

Buy­ing a mechan­i­cal sewing machine proves to have been a wise deci­sion for that time… When you scan Ebay, Craigslist or sewing enthu­si­ast blogs, you can see the lengths that some peo­ple go to in their quest to find a vin­tage mechan­i­cal sewing machine from Bern­ina or Pfaff… I feel lucky to have cho­sen as I did. I flinch at the prices charged for com­pa­ra­ble mod­els today.

While I’m attracted to some of the con­ve­nience fea­tures of today’s high end machines, it’s hard to ratio­nal­ize their high prices, just to match the func­tion­al­ity I have now… If I start sewing a lot, as I did in my teens and twen­ties, then a pre­mium sewing machine might make more sense. It’s hard to jus­tify now.

Thanks to an $89 tune-up, my Pfaff 1171 will run smoothly and sweetly once again. Bet­ter yet, I still have all the parts and acces­sories, all the nee­dles and bob­bins, plus a sewing cab­i­net with a (semi-func­tional) hydraulic lift. It’s a great set-up for my episodic use — peri­ods of intense projects fol­lowed by months (years?) of inac­tiv­ity. For what­ever rea­son, sewing is start­ing to appeal to me again.

New Projects

The green cover needs repair

My hus­band hopes to repair the pro­tec­tive cov­ers for Frol­ic’s sails. It’s unlikely that this Pfaff has the horse­power for such a heavy-duty sewing project: sewing through mul­ti­ple lay­ers of can­vas. He focuses on how small the sail cov­ers are, and there­fore believes this project should be well within the capa­bil­i­ties of our vin­tage Pfaff. We’ll see what hap­pens.

But for now I can’t wait to start some eas­ier projects with Madame Pfaff, once that she’s back from her spa treat­ments tomor­row.

First up: a med­i­ta­tion cush­ion fea­tur­ing some vin­tage Thai silk, sewn from the rem­nants of fab­ric used for cur­tains in my hus­band’s child­hood home in Swarth­more.

Closing Thoughts

Happy Valen­tine’s Day to me, from Madame “Tip­per” Pfaff. A true old lady, with beauty and ele­gance that’s hard to match.

My sis­ter is lucky to have my moth­er’s Pfaff 1171. I just hope she knows where to get it tuned up when needed… (We live on oppo­site coasts.)