The Pfaff 30-31 sewing machine - Stripping the paint - carefully
Mind the lead.
Click here to see all the Pfaff 30-31 posts.
While really old vintage sewing machines are japanned, newer vintage machines are painted. That paint often contains lead.
Japanning doesn’t contain lead so if you are forced to strip a japanned machine down to bare metal to refinish there should be no danger.
If the condition of the paint causes you to have to strip and repaint a vintage sewing machine (as with this Pfaff 30-31,) then you should either test and be sure or else assume it contains lead. There are various laws and regulations involved in handling waste material that contain lead. Check your local regulations for disposal and follow the suggestions of your national health organisation or occupational safety organisation for tips to working with materials containing lead.
I’m not going to cover how you work with the stuff or how you dispose of it. There are too many variations in laws and regulations around the world.
I will say just this much:
You are safe to use a sewing machine with lead paint as long as the paint is solid. It can’t leach out and get you, and you can’t absorb it through your skin.
If the paint is flaking off or crumbling then you should stop using the machine. There’s a (remote) possibility of swallowing a flake or crumb or of inhaling the dust. I’ve never found a safe lower limit for lead (no national health organisation wants to say “this amount of lead won’t hurt you”) so any lead is unsafe - though the fact that millions of people around the world grew up with lead paint all around them argues that your body can deal with at least some lead.
In any case, there are simple lead test swabs available that can tell you if the paint on your sewing machine contains lead. You can buy them on Amazon and potentially in other places. Our local paint store and the hardware stores didn’t have any, though.
| Test for lead |
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You dunk a swab in water, then rub it on the suspected lead containing paint. If the yellow swab turns red, then you’ve got lead in the paint.
As you can see, the paint on this Pfaff 30-31 contains lead.
My swabs didn’t arrive until after I had already started stripping the paint. Before that I simply worked on the assumption that the paint had lead in it.
The paint stripper itself is easy to use. The stuff I got is a sort of paste - it sticks to the surface rather than running off.
You should wear rubber gloves while working with the paint stripper. I got a small tear in one of my gloves and some of the stripper got on my palm unnoticed. I had a sort of chemical burn that took a couple of weeks to heal.
| Paint stripper |
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The paint they used way back when seems to be tougher than what modern paint stripper expects. The directions say to spread it on with a paint brush, let it sit for an hour, then scrape the dissolved paint off.
I tried that, and it didn’t do anything. The directions further say that you may need to put the stripper on the paint, cover it with plastic, then wait a few hours before scraping the paint off.
I tried that, too.
| Let the paint stripper soak |
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A few hours didn’t make any impression on the paint, either. I left it over night, and the next evening finally managed to scrape off some of the paint.
| First success |
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I started scraping with a wooden paddle because I was afraid of scratching the iron of the machine. That didn’t work well, so I switched to a regular steel bladed putty knife.
| Progress |
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It took several rounds of paint stripper and over night soaking to get rid of all the black paint and most of the gray primer. I didn’t want to remove all of the primer because it was used as a filler way back when they made this machine. The bed has marks on it from the milling machine they used to flatten the cast plate. The gray primer filled those marks so the bed is really smooth and flat.
Once I got most of the grunge off, I sanded the remainder smooth. There’s still some of the original primer coat (with lead) on the machine, but it’ll be underneath some modern paint and shellac when it’s done - no hazard to future users.
I wet sanded the machine so that I wouldn’t breath in any dust with lead, and kept everything wet while working on it.
| Stripped and sanded |
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Keep the following points in mind when stripping paint off of an old sewing machine:
- The paint may contain lead - test to be sure or else work on the assumption that there’s lead present. Follow all needed safety precautions and dispose of waste according to your local (or national) regulations.
- Modern paint stripper may not do well on old paint - it may take several applications with long soaking times to make any progress.
- Modern paint stripper may not do well on old paint, but it will do a number on your skin. Wear rubber gloves.
- You don’t want to remove everything on the bed down to bare metal. If you do, then you’ll have to apply filler (bondo) to smooth out the surface.
- The paint stripper softens the paint. You’ll want to let the machine “set” for a couple of days after the stripping so that the primer that you leave on the bed has to time to harden before you start sanding and painting.
- Oil the sewing machine before you apply paint stripper. Give all the moving parts a good coat of oil. That will help keep the paint stripper and the water you use to rinse it off from rusting the working parts of the machine.
- Oil the machine after you rinse off the paint stripper. The paint stripper will attack the oil and take some with it. Oiling things again as you go will help keep rust from forming.