Pearson No 6 Restoration

[Singermania]

HI All, we've just taken on the full restoration of Begsy's (Gary Begley) of Burrum River Saddlery & School fame's Pearson and Bennion No 6 harness machine. Its a great honour to take on the restoration of this machine for such a well known Australian iconic business, also a bit worrying as the results will become known Australia wide.....gulp.... better do a good job!! I'm going to show photos along the way and try to give a step by step description of its progress. Two of our 18 Pearsons are parts machines, our usual practice is to strip parts for parts orders and then rebuild the machine again so that they are always complete and in good running order, however most parts orders consist of springs, screws, rollers for the flywheel cams, needle plates and lower drives etc. On this occasion Begsy's machine is missing major structural parts too, such as the boomerang shaped arm and roller that lifts the foot for each stitch and the shaft and arm that facilitates the thread draw off for the shuttle. Ordinarily a machine missing these parts would be shelved and become a parts machine itself, as these parts are not available, especially when it is also missing pretty much every spring, roller and plate.

[Singermania]

The restoration continues and we've decided to take the opportunity to also restore our two parts machines at the same time... job is becoming bigger everyday. So far we've cleaned up Begsy's machine, ie removed a century of dirt and grease, finally after several hours removed seized shafts and started repainting parts that don't need mechanical restoration. Later will show some photos of all 3 machines during restoration.

[Singermania]

Progress continues... we repaint with rust preventative primer and then black rust inhibitor gloss topcoat. Pictures show our two spares machines and the other foto is a line up of the three handwheels, notice that Begsy's is the Pearson and Bennion, ours are the British United and the Paris United machine wheels.

[samthedog]

G'day Singermania. Nice job on the restoration. Out of curioustiy, couldn't many of the parts be replaced with similar but non-original? In this age of CNC machines, having a few dozen parts machined or ordering some sandcast parts couldn't be too cost prohibitive.

This was one of the reasons I built up a machine shop. This way I can machine all the parts for obsolete machines (which my garage is full of).

Anyway, I'll follow this thread with interest. I spent a great deal of time in Bundy, having originated from Central Queensland myself (Gladstone and Rockhampton). I look forward to more posts.

Paul.

[Singermania]

HI Paul, thanks for posting a comment. I'd like to hear more about that garage full of obsolete machines!!! Like you I am building up a cache of tools and machinery to remanufacture parts, however its still slow. Have contacted a few engineers but they always seem to be reluctant to do 'one off' parts, I usually leave their premises and do the job myself. No there are only a few new spares available for Pearsons, some in Canada and some from ourselves, we do replacement flywheel handles, needle plates, under plate drives and rein rounder sets. The two larger parts needed I am making now, to get a short run of a dozen of each made would mean carrying the other 11 parts for hundreds of years, as these parts are never ordered, and so would represent a big loss financially. The Pearson no 6 is so robust that it appears self perpetually at times, most machines don't wear out or break in service, its mostly in shipping that they come to grief, ie hit by fork lift tynes, dropped or backed into by heavily plated vehicles. Regards Steve

[Singermania]

New arm made in-house, new one on the bottom

new arm on bottom

another new arm, needs a bit of grinding yet....

this is the next arm to be tackled.....

[Singermania]

Some more photos as we progress

[Singermania]

but wait there's more

[Singermania]

some more shots of components being made.... in the first photo this part was cut from a solid block.... rather than trying to cast it. The next shots are of new shuttle cover plates (right and left) made from steel plate, brass from water pump and brass screws inserted by Trevor Barlow, our tame engineer.

[Singermania]

Here now is the machine back together along with some shots of our parts machines also being restored.... the last photo shows the machine stitching, a far cry from its more recent ability where 30% of major and minor parts were missing and what was in situ was rusted, worn out or smashed pretty badly with hammers. I'm going to suggest to Begsy that whilst I'm really pleased with the restoration and it works perfectly, that I would be happier if he took one of our other machines and we kept this one here as a demonstrator. It's been hit so heavily with steel hammers that shafts had to be filed and reamed, shafts had to be straightened, there was also significant rust in the bearing surfaces....I'm not confident in the strength of the main casting of the carcass. The parts on this Pearson and Bennion machine are also slightly different to other Pearsons.