Sewing Machine After Market Manuals, Painting Vintage Sewing Machines

Hi There!  You can find many sewing machine manuals for your vintage sewing machine online free as downloadable PDF's.  I downloaded the manual for the Singer 500A Slant-O-Matic Rocketeer sewing machine.  It was not too bad; however there were a number of missing pages - mainly detailed pictures and explanations of the decorative stitches and also the color pictures pages. 

Then I ordered this from a person on eBay:

"Rare Deluxe-Edition Instructions Manual for Singer 500, 500A Sewing Machines"   The only selection for shipping was media mail - sigh.  It finally arrived yesterday and was better than the download in that the format and fonts were larger for easier reading and it included the missing pages and the color pages-Yay!  My only complaint is that some of the sewing machine - that is the machine itself - illustrations were lighter than I would have liked.  If they had been dark it would have been better.  All-in-all the "new" manual is good enough and legible enough to use.


The name of the seller on eBay is doriefrie1.  She has other deluxe manuals and also service manuals. 

Here is a link to the Singer 500A manual that I purchased from her.

If you live far away from an authorized Singer service center/sewing and vacuum repair shop or if you lack funds, you might want to invest in a deluxe service manual.  It's interesting to see how all the various parts inside a sewing machine link together and work.

I'd really like to paint the Singer 500A a light pink solid color, not pearl or metallic flake, but I'm afraid to as when we get the sewing machine back, I don't want to chance ruining it by getting paint stripping chemicals, paint or clear coat on the inside parts. 

For the various plates and knobs, on the gold colors I would like to paint them chrome and on brown parts I would like to paint those black with chrome numerals.

You can compare to the pink Cadillac above to see how that would look - there's even black on the dashboard. 

So to reiterate that would mean the balance wheel would be pink, but the gold wheel closer to the machine would be chrome, the thread tension gold plus minus wheel would be chrome with a black plus and minus sign, the brown Singer plate on the light housing would be black and the "Singer" and outer ring would be chrome, the large A-J stitch selector knob would be chrome and the brown underneath knob stitch selector K-Special would be black.  On the stitch length screw knob - that would be chrome while the plate would be black with chrome on the design accents and numbers.

It would look really good I think - like that pink Cadillac.

If you were brave enough to paint your vintage sewing machine, what colors would you paint it?  Let me know.  Thank you for reading, Kathy