Roy

It makes me sad as those were probably a gift - or intended to be a gift for the person selling them

This is awesome and heartbreaking at the same time. If I had known this was going down I would have tried really hard to get my ass and 3 pairs of ROYs out to LA.

mr randal wrote: At Inspiration15 Roy had a party for one of his machines- a super rare alternate make/model to the standard Union Special chain stitcher. There were a series or illustrations with text outlining its histore- I'll see if I can borrow those from Roy and take some nice closeups.  He put the special machine to good use, hemming jeans at $1 per leg: It was measure and cut your own jeans, with a handy illustrated guide:

Edited by mr randal - 17 Feb 2015 at 12:22am

Is that a chainstitch machine Mr Randal? Did you mean an alternative to the Union Special hemmer rather than the Singer or have I totally misunderstood this? Looks good either way.

is it singer-branded? do you have close-up pics of the resulting chainstitch? does he use it to hem the regular roy jeans?

ROY said they only made about 450 of them in the thirties, and this may be the only one extant. He was kicking dirt when he almost broke it doing some 21oz's. The Union Special uses a distinctive crankshaft setup with vertical connecting rods to actuate the eccentrics. While a substantially rare machine, I think in principal this one probably works more like a conventional flat bed chainstitch with horizontal straight shafts under the bed. (this is open for correction)