My friend Janet -- someone I have become friends with through this blog and through her own, the very entertaining Suck It Up, Buttercup -- had found a Meister 101 in the wild, specifically Whitefish, Montana and offered to retrieve it for me. (She lives in beautiful Kalispell.) Like a true collector, she found yet another machine in my neck of the woods (the Seattle metro area), a Necchi BF Mira in excellent condition which I purchased for her; we agreed to meet in Spokane the aforementioned weekend to exchange machines and meet each other in person.
Janet's daughter Mariah was with her and according to Janet's own account, she remarked that though we had not met in person until then, it was as if we were continuing a conversation we had begun many years ago in which long stretches of absence never matter. Janet is as friendly, funny, generous, and genuinely nice as her blog posts and comments and in person even more so. The sewing community is filled with great people and Janet does our hobby proud; a shared interest often facilitates such meetings and I'm very glad we agreed to have a machine exchange. Thank you, Janet! I hope we can do this again.
As she knows, I'm particularly fond of German mid-century machines and this 1953 Meister 101 is a really wonderful example of the kind of engineering that makes them so smooth, powerful, and to me, desirable. I admit I haven't run the machine except to test that it works (and does it ever), but it is the beauty of the design and the cosmetic and mechanical condition that help make it such a great acquisition.
The width and length levers have an extremely long travel, facilitating very small adjustments. The hand wheel is large and set apart from the body, the needle position lever on top also being large and easily adjusted. I love the oil port arrow decals (and the red oil ports on both sides of the 1.0 amp motor), the hand wheel direction decal, and the limiting switch in the width lever. Sometimes found badged as a Sewmaster (though neither version is very common), much of the Meister's design reminds me of the Anker RZ, another German machine I really like.
The hand wheel moves with an ungodly amount of smoothness and without a single drop of oil I found it both heavy and free with the only sound being the rise and fall of the feed dog mechanism, a very soft click typically made by a precision instrument. The shafts and rods of this machine are very thick, particularly the secondary drive shaft. Like the Anker RZ, the Pfaff 130 and 30, and other German machines of this era, there is a semi-industrial level of quality here.
The nose plate reminds me of several German machines, notably the Anker RZ and some Pfaff models, although the Meister has an angled back edge that sets it apart.
Clearly this particular machine has seen very little use. It's near-mint and I am extremely pleased to have it. Once again, my gratitude is to Janet, a collector who has the eye and the passion for fine vintage machinery. The Meister 101 is more than a keeper -- it is among the top few machines in my collection.
(Hard to believe it's about 62 years old! Also hard to believe is the price: $30!)
