Hey all,
Figured I'd introduce myself - I'm a self-employed machinist in upstate NY (capital region), and I've been working with metal for over half my life at this point. I have a couple bar fed, dual spindle CNC lathes in my shop and I make small parts for large steam turbines, nerf blasters, and hydrogen fuel cell systems. I also run a couple Formlabs Fuse series SLS printers. I've had a lifelong passion for making stuff that eventually turned into a passion for using, modifying, and maintaining industrial manufacturing equipment of all kinds. I found this forum when I got back into sewing about a year ago (mostly bags, some hats, and I'm now learning pattern drafting for garments) and quickly fell down the rabbit hole that is industrial sewing machines. This site has been an incredible resource for information about the range of sewing equipment that's out there!
I started off with an 80s-era Brother Walmart-grade domestic machine, which was...frustrating, to say the least. The feed dogs were out of square with the presser foot and needle bar axis so it defaulted to sewing about a 6" radius curve to the left. Not great! I took it apart and remachined the mounting surface on the feed dog plate, which was out of parallel by somewhere around .020" across the ~1/2" wide mounting face 🫣
Didn't have a mill at the shop at the time, so it went in the lathe with a sketchy setup - tried turning that face initially, but the overhang was just too much and it chattered like crazy. Live tooling came to the rescue though, and I cleaned it up by jogging an endmill back and forth across the surface. Parallelism between the feed dog teeth and the mounting surface was greatly improved, on the order of .001-.002" as far as I could measure. The machine still pulled to the left a bit after that, though it was far more usable than before. By that point, it became clear that I needed something more capable, and I'd already started researching industrial machines.
Within a month or so, I picked up a Durkopp-Adler class 272 needle feed machine with an Efka Variostop system on it, which I converted to 110V from 208V 3ph with a reverse fed transformer and VFD that I had laying on the shelf. That Efka system is incredibly cool from an engineering standpoint and is also much easier to convert to residential power because the motor runs continuously, using an electronic clutch and brake to drive the machine, rather than starting and stopping on demand like a modern servo would.
Later last year, I grabbed a "Chansew" (Chandler) Model 100RB for a price that was too good to pass up, which is one of the various flavors of top/bottom feed machines imported under the Chandler, Consew, and Seiko names. Still working on putting together a table for it, and I'm debating how I wanna approach the drive system, since it came with an old clutch motor that I'm not very interested in using. The obvious route is a Chinese servo system, but I'm particularly interested in building my own out of some Clearpath servos I have leftover from an old project, with the eventual goal of adding a stitch programmer that I can set up for various repetitive tasks.
All of my sewing so far has been fabric-oriented rather than leather, in part because it's more accessible, but also because it makes more sense for a lot of my applications so far. The 272 above is firmly a garment-class machine and could at best handle lighter leathers, but it's definitely not made for it. The Chandler is likely going to be my introduction into leather sewing after I get it set up, and I'm particularly interested in making leather bags with it. Currently lusting after a cylinder arm machine of some kind, ideally with a synchronized binder, as binding raw edges is currently one of my biggest struggles.
Some of my work is below:
Designed and made this tote bag yesterday! Needed a better bag for grocery-getting. This one's got two cargo pockets on the inside ends in addition to patch pockets near the handles and has a total volume of 16L.
One of my other interests is in making tactical gear for Nerf blasters, where bright colors are preferred over the camo and dark solid tones traditionally available in that space. I made a bandolier a few months ago for some 3D printed shotgun shells that hold a variety of soft ammo types in various quantities, and printed a little jig to handle sizing and spacing the loops so I didn't have to measure and mark out each seam location. It's sized for my centered zipper foot and worked extremely well for the ~50 loops on the sling. The elastic ended at exactly the right spot and the whole thing went together very quickly - a very satisfying evening project.
PXL_20251018_001414964.mp4
