About

We help people buy a used sewing machine without getting burned. Name the machine you’re after, like a Singer Featherweight, a 401A, a Bernina 830, a Pfaff 130 or a Juki TL-2010Q, and there’s a page for it. Each one tells you the machine’s story, the needles, bobbins and feet it takes, the versions you’ll see listed and what to check before you buy.

What sewists know about these machines is scattered across old manuals, collector sites, quilting forums and decades of repair benches, and a raw eBay search gives you none of it. So we keep 33 machine pages in one place, write down the tells that usually take years to learn (oil gone to varnish, cracked wiring, a missing bobbin case, the wrong feet or cams, freight that costs more than the machine) and pick the listings we’d buy.

We don’t sell sewing machines. No affiliate links. We earn nothing. We run no analytics or tracking cookies, and we’re not affiliated with any sewing machine maker. See how we work for how the pages are researched and our disclosure for how links, picks and photos work.

Bobbin Case is part of allbutnew, a set of shops for secondhand gear. Got a machine to sell? The “Get an offer” link on every machine page sends it to our sewing machine expert, who replies by email.