Right now I have five industrial machines. The 29K72, the 95-40, the 96-10, the 103 and now the 107W5. The 107W5 is the only machine without propulsion. The 103 is in the industrial treadle, the rest have clutch motors assigned to them. So that needs to be fixed.
For me the obvious choice is to put a servo motor on it. Lower power requirement than a clutch motor and less noise. Really there's no reason to go with a clutch motor at this point. But that got me thinking, if a servo motor is better for the 107W5, why not for all the powered industrials? So for the past few nights I've been laying awake at night planning how to do it. Rather than spending half a grand on motors - money better spent on more machines, how about a single servo motor on its own mounting plate I can move to whatever industrial I'm using at the time?
Today I started working on my 'proof of concept'. Since it will be a bit before I actually get around to buying the servo motor, maybe a year knowing me, I decided to build a test rig using one of the dozen or so abandoned domestic motors I have laying around.
Step one was to find a nice base that would wedge tight to the 107W5 so it can't torque itself to the side or pull up when the belt is on and it starts spinning. I went with a piece of wooden garden border we had left over from building out the wife's gardens a couple years ago. Cut it down to a non-intrusive size and drill the mounting hole for the motor bracket.
I used a masonry anchor basically because it's what I had available. It's just a test so I wasn't going to spend money on it. After getting the first one in and testing it I decided to add a second.
The next step was to pick the motor. I brought three down from the sewing room. A Singer .6 amp, A Matsushita .87 amp and an Oster 1 amp. Guess which one I picked.
Yeah, I'm a homer for Singer. The others are more powerful, but com'on, it has a little Singer name plate on it. Plus easy to connect and disconnect the power and pedal.
Then it was on to the belt. And this is where things went a little off the rails. I tried leather first, but it was just too stiff to make the tight turn around the motor's hub. Then I tried cheesy rope but it was just too slick.
The only viable solution was to use an actual sewing machine belt. Unfortunately my circumference requirement is 18" and the longest belt I have available is a 15" v-belt. Accommodations were made.
As you can see sitting the rig on a stack of books makes it hard to keep tension on the belt. To test it I had to hold the wood with my hand and push it tight to get enough friction to catch the belt. But it did indeed catch and it did spin the balance wheel. SPM were probably down around a couple of hundred, but the little .6 amp motor did run it.
I have an 18" belt that should be here by the 15th and can give it a real test and maybe try to sew something. I'll probably swap to the Oster 1 amp motor when that happens.
While doing Google research I found quite a number of people who do this kind of thing. But then I also found a guy who had taken the clutch assembly of a Singer industrial motor, put a pully directly on the shaft and was running it through a foot pedal. Hmm, so to end the night, guess what I did?
Yeah, there's a whole other blog post and probably a video coming about pulling off the clutch assembly from a Singer industrial motor and running it with a variable speed controller instead.
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