Singer sewing machine: built for a lifetime

In 1954 my father bought my mother a new Singer sewing machine.

Mum used it to make all our clothes:

Of course that changed once Australian clothes manufacturing got off the ground:

She still used it time to time but it was not used much until I was in my teens and decided making my own clothes was the only way i was going to be able to dress like a real hippie.

That's when mum taught me how to use the Singer though i never thought to ask her how to maintain it properly.

Years later, when i had children of my own, I begged her to let me have it so i could make clothes for them and do repairs and alterations.

I used it for years though i often cursed that it did not have a "free arm" so i could take up jeans and such.

The Singer was lugged from house to house as over the years we moved to where the work was. That meant that it moved from Melbourne to Sydney and then to New Zealand where it moved from town to town until returning to Sydney, back to NZ, back to Sydney and eventually to Thailand where it's been sitting at the farm of my wife's family for a while.

My mum died in November 2013.

The day she died my mother in law reported that the Singer had stopped working.

I've spent hours trying to fix it but it just refuses to operate properly:

It's survived the lifetime of my mother but seems as though it misses her as much as i do.

Update! October 2015.

Now we have a "new" one - a Singer special zig-zag 498:

what's really nice is that we have the User Manual.