How wonderful for your group! I sew with a charity group myself and we use donated machines, in fact, everything we use has been donated.....fabrics, threads, trims, patterns even. We have made a number of quilts and at the moment we are putting backing on at least 3 different ones. I hope you are able to find out some information about these machines and our group has found it interesting using all the different machines we have available, I'm sure it will help your young ladies as well. Good luck.

Welcome back. Glad you are finally back online. We missed you. Old Singer's were made by our own US Singer Company. When they went out of business completely, the name was sold and they are now made overseas. I don't know much about new ones but the old ones were wonderful. (My husband worked for them long ago.) I look at new ones like I would any new machine and ignore the fact that the name Singer is on it.

The White may last through a couple leather projects, but i doubt it will work long term. While many industrial machines have reverse now, they don't have zig-zag and double needle options. For the most part, true industrial machines do one operation, if a machine does more than that, it's probably not an industrial. I have an old Bernina 950, an alleged commercial machine. While it will zig-zag and may accept a double needle, it would never sew leather reliably. White is a low-end home sewing machine.

I don't know where I get my information that I seem to have in my head about Coronado, several sources really. Some of it comes from someone who did a video report pre-internet that I have seen, There does seem to be a dearth of information about Coronado. So I think this might be a good place to put out what I think I know, and maybe some one who does the research can correct it. Coronado was a little ambitious company that wanted to be a part of the modern industrialization of the 1800s, in a large part led by Singer, but they did not set out to be a Singer cloning company; They were into metal work. They had a small plant (picture a brick warehouse with a small foundry and a work yard). They were from the start looking for a good product that would make them good money. It didn't go very well; they did piece work, but their main stay, low profit products were toys. They were looking for a solid product line when the sewing machine opportunity arrived, which they enthusiastically dived into. They got rid of all their non sewing machine making tooling and they made their first sewing machines in house. At that time they decided that they needed a "brand name". The owner was aware of the conquistador Coronado, and he was infatuated with the Southwest though he had never been there, but mainly he like the way it sounded: "It's a Coronado". Many people do not realize the high drama around sewing machines. Sewing machines led the industrial revolution, especially about machines and factories. Singer might be said to be the first multi-notional :-), and of course while their patents were in force, they had a monopoly. When the patent monopoly ended, a number of firms jumped in the sewing machine manufacturing game, little guys. So then, National Sewing Machine sets out to consolidate American, non-Singer sewing machine manufacturing. Singer's scale and internationalism as well as National Sewing Machine's name made it plausibly a patriotic business operation, but I think it was simple anti-competitive market consolidation. So after WWII National Sewing Machine's function is taken over by Brother, and National Sewing Machine goes out of business. I would not be surprised if National Sewing Machine and Brother had major stockholders in common at that time. So Coronado was all in on being a sewing machine manufacturer, but was not really set up for such mass production, and were approached by National Sewing Machine to have National Sewing Machine make their machines. They didn't really want National Sewing Machine to make their sewing machines, but could see that they would never be able to compete and stay afloat, so they made the deal to badge their machines. This was in the 1800s. All the other cloning companies were bought up or went out of business. Coronado survived, but turned basically into a sales company, but they had a solid contract so they could compete as an indy label. They did make another short lived attempt at doing something on the engineering side. I think the 2 step button holing sewing machine might be the only thing to come out of it. I'm not sure. The only one I have seen anything on is the one I posted about at: https://www.reddit.com/r/SewingMachinePorn/comments/1ahdwvu/missing_from_the_internet_coronado_451409_sm51409a/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 This is an improved rewrite of a post I made there. This is also the machine where I first made note of Coronado, back in the late 1960s or early 1970s. I was a kid. Is this a two step button holer unicorn? If anyone knows of another, let me know .. or where a manual to this machine, a #45-1409, S.M,5-1409A can be found . Some investigative reporter wanted to know what happened to Coronado when the department stores closed and the Coronado machines disappeared from the market. He tracked the company down to a one room office in some low rent office building. He finally got a hold of the man running the place, who was seemingly well into retirement. At some point the owner just made a contract with minor department store companies to do the selling and to furnish them with machines made by his suppliers, and he put the business on auto-pilot.