Spencer Hand Crank surprise

Syo spent a good chunk of last August hinting that she had gotten me the most excellent birthday present, that she couldn’t wait to give to me. Keeping in mind that she got me a pretty amazing copper kettle with a triple whistle for Mother’s Day… the bar was already pretty high.

Well, the day came, and it did not disappoint. After the requisite brunch, she and her fiancé unveiled a most adorable gift:

My very first hand-crank sewing machine!

Now, around here at least, treadles seem to be a dime a dozen, but I have rarely seen an actual hand-crank in the wild. There is a family story about my mom’s great aunt, who made a living as an itinerant seamstress, travelling around southern Ontario sewing for farm families with her handcrank machine. A sewing friend had one shipped from Scotland. There is one at the Marr Residence, though it’s missing a few pieces.

Anyway, Syo had found one for me.

Please meet the Spencer VS.

It’s adorable. Very functional. And I can find out almost nothing very little about it.

Perhaps obviously, it’s a vibrating shuttle machine. It has a really neat stitch length adjustment, including a reverse feature, which I don’t think I have actually seen on a vibrating shuttle machine (but I don’t exactly have extensive experience of them, either)

It uses almost the same bobbin and vibrating shuttle as my 1924 Singer treadle (from my Dad’s mom), a standard needle, and short-shank foot attachment; it has its original straight toed foot, a more recent option identical to the one on my Featherweight, and, perhaps most excitingly, a couple of attachments. One is a quilting bar (which I got to explain to Syo), and two others that actually screw to the machine bed itself. I think these are what tipped Syo over into buying it.

One of them is a fairly straightforward adjustable hemmer, that actually works remarkable well at least at its smaller end of settings. I wouldn’t call it quite a rolled hem, but it makes lovely narrow hems and stitches beautifully close to the folded edge (I should actually try it on my featherweight, as the rolled hem feet I have for that seem to stitch more in the middle of the fold)

The other is both simpler and more mysterious… maybe meant to assist with sewing tucks? Also adjustable.

But what of the hand-crank mechanism itself?

I had always been a bit leery of hand-cranks as the idea of having to use one hand to power the machine while only having one to manipulate the fabric seems a bit dicey. I assume that the people of the time felt the same, which is why they’re so much more rare. But, the ability to control the needle is remarkable.

The crank isn’t just a knob attached to the hand-wheel, as I had sort-of assumed, but actually a geared mechanism, so you get rather more than one stitch per rotation. The confusing part is that you move the crank in the opposite direction of the handwheel, which, after years of training myself not to handwheel backwards, feels incredibly wrong. On the up side, the twins are incredibly intrigued by it so I often don’t even have to crank it myself.

The cover is somewhat battered, with some breakage at the corners, and I’m not sure how to stabilize it, but it’s gorgeous. There’s a beautiful ruler inlaid in the veneer along the front, though the edge was splintering up. Some wood glue and weights seem to have stabilized it, fortunately.

So, as I mentioned, a search for “Spencer Vibrating Shuttle” produced nothing at all. However, the top of the cover has a bit of additional information:

This led me to SewMuse, which identifies A. W. Spencer as selling Bradbury sewing machines (a British manufacturer) from this location from at least 1893 to 1905. However, the Bradbury machines are definitely different from the machine Syo found for me.

I eventually turned up this old Worthpoint listing of a Spencer-branded machine, from the same Cardiff location, but identifies it as a badged model produced by the German brand Anker. The machine on Worthpoint isn’t the same as mine, either, but it led me to look up other machines of that maker. On this page on Fiddlebase I finally hit the jackpot—a whole slew of machines that look almost identical to mine, identified as Anker Vibrating Shuttle machines, sometimes model O or P. Even the covers and the inlaid veneer ruler on the base are the same. There is a bit more information on this German website, as well, although it’s oddly resistant to automated translation at least on my phone. I THINK it is saying that the model my machine represents was introduced in 1899, but the machines in the catalogue from 1900 look rather older and don’t have the same style of stitch length adjuster. The German manufacturer does explain why the forward end of the stitch length gauge is labeled “V” rather than “F”.

So best guess is that sometime after 1905, Mr. Spencer got tired of selling Bradbury machines and started selling Ankers, badged with his own name. Maybe they were cheaper at the time, maybe Bradbury wasn’t willing to let him put his own name on their machines? Either way, I haven’t really managed to nail down the age of the machine much more than “first half of the 20th century.” Which is really what you would guess at first glance.

How the machine made its way from Wales to western Canada is an entirely different question, too. It might, of course, have been brought over by an original immigrant—but it could also have arrived more recently via eBay or some other online reselling platform. It seems like the person Syo got it from had been a bit of a collector (or at least, his late wife had been).

In any case, it’s a gorgeous machine, and despite being well used it works wonderfully, and definitely played its part in a number of projects since, despite all the landscaping and home renovation that is getting in the way of my sewing this year.

And Syo even went to an antique shop and found me a key for the cover!