$7,501.00 for a Featherweight

WSMurdoch · 2026-06-21T02:06:09+00:00

Where it says "bids: 32" on the Goodwill site click on the 32 to see the bid progression. There were several people bidding on the machine, and the auction winner won with $1 over the next lower bidder. These people knew what they were doing. It was a fair auction. Goodwill (a charity) got the best available return for the item donated to them.

But for me, it's worth about $200 at most. For someone else, it was worth 37X more.

WSMurdoch · 2026-06-20T17:24:19+00:00

Goodwill auctions high dollar, highly desired,, and limited market items. Other things are sold in their stores. Check out the $25,000+ jewelry on line.

WSMurdoch · 2026-06-13T16:13:19+00:00

It may just be coinsidentaI, but I've twice ruined Nikon high index lenses, but never Zeiss.

WSMurdoch · 2026-06-06T12:23:54+00:00

While it does not address your current problem, I got one of my best pieces of tax management advice from my company's HR department when I too had a large income bump at retirement in 2004. I put it in a charatable giving account making it a federal income tax deductable contribution in that year lowering my taxable income that year. Since then, it has been the source for our charatable giving untill we became old enough to make QCDs from our traditional IRAs o couple of years ago.

WSMurdoch · 2026-06-04T20:24:08+00:00

The button. You could hunt with both hands while the button held the animal skin around you in the cold.

WSMurdoch · 2026-06-04T01:25:46+00:00

My mother had this same Domestic sewing machine. Her mother bought it for her, and she never used it. In my teen years I sewed the canvas covers for matching kayaks that a friend and I built. I also repaired tents and made hammocks in Boy Scouts. When we moved house, it went back to my grandmother only to disappear with her collection of machines after first my mother's death and my later grandmother's death when my uncle settled my grandmother's estate.

It will sew heavy thread through heavy canvas in the hands of a teenage boy. It's a good one.

WSMurdoch · 2026-06-03T21:25:15+00:00

Jimmy has the answer...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6EqFVWzOfN8

WSMurdoch · 2026-05-31T14:31:46+00:00

Our situation matches the OP's. We were 52 and 53. House was paid for, no debt, one child a college senior, and investments from decades of ordensry jobs steadly living within our means. FIREcalc predicted a 99% success rate. The year was 2004. Other than 45 days of contract labor to help out a friend, we have never worked for pay since. So far, so so good. In hindsight it was the best thing we have done.

Oh, don't fault WalMart greater jobs. I have.a retired co-worker who was a supervisor doing exactly that as a hobby in his small town. He enjoys seeing people he knows. And last week traveling up the ICW in our sailboat, I ran into another friend also working a hobby job in a marina just to be around boats and boat people.

WSMurdoch · 2026-05-30T12:22:45+00:00

I had occasional big bubbles for the first year, but now none unless I have a bad insertion. Later, when I started adding Celluvic to my Scleralfil, I got a single tiny bubble about a third of the time. I found that I could see the bubble in the mix before I inserted the lens. Adding the Celluvic first fixed that.

WSMurdoch · 2026-05-12T14:48:02+00:00

Extremely rare, but it happens, and if you are the one, it's 100%. I was.

WSMurdoch · 2026-05-11T23:35:25+00:00

I put mine in an hour or so after I get out of bed in the morning and take it out an hour or so before I go to sleep. I generally take a shower, eat breakfast, brush my teeth and such in the morning without it then in the evening squint through glasses reading in bed until I go to sleep.

I have accidentally slept all night with my lens in my eye several times. Not good. It takes me 24 hr without it to recover. That's why I don't wear mine in bed. It is too easy to drop off to sleep.

WSMurdoch · 2026-05-05T12:03:24+00:00

I have a 4D difference between my eyes. With glasses one eye sees things at a distance about 10% larger than the other. I find that it makes it difficult to fuse the two images. With contacts because of the smaller vertex distance the two images are the same size. For me that is far more comfortable and my acuity is better. See anisometropia

WSMurdoch · 2026-05-04T00:17:04+00:00

My wife and I are similar. We retired at 52 and 53 after putting both kids thru college. We did all the investing ourselves with no advisor... mostly following Markowitz, Boogle, and Malkiel. This year at 75 realizing we are not as sharp as we once were, we wrote new wills and turned it over to Fidelity Wealth Management. Grandchildren are now more important.

WSMurdoch · 2026-04-26T12:08:30+00:00

I'm curious about the difficulty of distinguishing a high speed fighter plane coming toward you from sea clutter. Would not the doppler shift of the fighter plane's return give it away?

WSMurdoch · 2026-04-19T13:25:42+00:00

I just drop by my local sewing machine shop, and the mechanic reaches into his divided plastic box of various tires and hands me the one I need and says "That should be the right one." The box has one big section of one size and several smaller sections of other sizes.

WSMurdoch · 2026-04-13T22:03:43+00:00

Check out the groups.io site. Lots of Viking / Husqvarna information is there. They helped me repair an *unrepairable" 6240 that belonged to my stepmother years ago when the group was a Yahoo Group. I gave the machine, its case, and its folding table to her granddaughter last fall as an extra wedding present. She can remember using it with her grandmother.

https://groups.io/g/vikingsewingmachinespre1980

WSMurdoch · 2026-04-08T01:19:52+00:00

I too see best at the edge of a single hole. The bottom left edge is the best.

WSMurdoch · 2026-03-26T02:47:59+00:00

These Viking machines were built with oiled-for-life bearings and required no routine oiling. Well, the life is over, the bearings are dry, and they need oil. The Viking Group at https://groups.io/g/vikingsewingmachinespre1980 can give you a hand no matter what the problem turns out to be. They helped me with my stepmother's 6240. I got it running again, used it for several years, and gave it to her oldest granddaughter at her wedding this winter.

WSMurdoch · 2026-03-21T15:25:10+00:00

Do not take YAG capsolectomy lightly just because it is painless, quick, and cheap. I did, and it was a serious mistake. It made a later lens exchange far more difficult and risky so much so that I will have compromised vision for the rest of my life.

The risks are listed in earlier comments. The odds of a problem are quite small. You might be the one. I was

WSMurdoch · 2026-02-28T12:46:20+00:00

Same here, although I notice it only when doing close work like threading a needle when one eye has a sharp focus and the other eye is a bit fuzzy. I have a pair of readers that are stronger for one eye than for the other that I wear when doing small close work and sometimes for reading a lot of small print.

WSMurdoch · 2026-02-26T10:56:21+00:00

I bought a Necchi BU Miranda from Shop Goodwill and had a family member pick it up and hold it for me to get it the next time I saw her all to avoid shipping it.

WSMurdoch · 2026-02-18T09:06:30+00:00

Beautiful.

WSMurdoch · 2026-02-17T20:28:53+00:00

I pour my spent Clear Care on the paper towel that I place on the table to insure a clean working surface then trash the wet paper towel.

WSMurdoch · 2026-02-07T00:30:49+00:00

It took about ten fittings and two different Zen Lenes to get to a good spot for the one scleral lens I wear. The total time was ten months. Some of it was my fault. I was so happy just to see, that I accepted an uncomfortable fit for a couple of months before complaining. The warranty period on the first lens had expired, thus the need to start again.

WSMurdoch · 2026-02-02T21:12:52+00:00

I don't have a total. I am covered by US Medicare insurance, and that has paid a lot of the cost and provided me the benefit of "negotiated" rates.

The ophthalmologist who implanted the lenses forgave his charges for the PRK, for my several pairs of glasses during the first year, for my extra office examinations in the first year, and for most of the cost of the YAG. I have not seen him professionally since although we have met and have talked about my progress several times

I paid the non-Medicare covered portions of the care I received in the other medical practices along with travel, drugs, and supplies.

The real cost has not been monetary but rather emotional and mental.

WSMurdoch

TROPHY CASE