Motorizing The Leather Sewing Machine, For Under $50

hey I'm Christopher making everything and this is the hundred dollar sewing machine that I talked about on my channel about a year ago and today I'm gonna show you how you can add a motor to it for under $50 with all stuff you can buy online and no special tools check it out alright so in May of 2019 I put out a video on my channel talking about this awesome little sewing machine that I found on Amazon it's a hundred and fifteen dollars and it's a manual hand crank sewing machine for stitching leather and heavy fabric the video went totally crazy and had you know seven hundred thousand views and a lot of people bought these machines and in the comments a lot of them said you know it'd be so easy to slap a motor on this well I've spent the last couple months thinking about that and a couple people have put motors on them but most of them take this drive wheel and they send it out to someone with a lead and they have them put a groove in it and they put a a pulley on that and a belt and you know they they utilize the machine basically as it is but with modification now that's great if you have access to a machine shop but I didn't want to figure out a way to motorized this that required all that special tooling or paying somebody money sending out this wheel just seemed like a lot of work so I kind of thought about it I bought a bunch of different parts online and eventually I came up with what I think is a really elegant solution so let's get into it for those of you who aren't familiar with this machine this is a hand cranked machine so this is a piece of veg to the way it stitches right now so I turn this wheel on the side the Machine cranks through and it feeds using the foot and can stitch leather very easily it really does a great job on leather multiple pieces single pieces it just has no problem stitching leather and it's a great little machine for you know making knife sheaths or you know anything with leather belts stuff like that so the problem is you know the more you use this thing you more the more you wish it would just run on its own so here's what I've come up with now this pulley is from a Husqvarna snow blower I believe or a lawn mower I'll put a link to all the parts from this in the description of this video and what's important about this pulley is that it has a V groove in it that doesn't bottom out for a traditional like v belt so with this you can use polyurethane belting that you can make your own length so this stuff we're gonna heat up with a lighter and we're gonna basically glue it to itself to make a custom length belt and what's specific about this type of pulley is that this type of pulley can be mounted right to the face of this wheel without modifying this wheel at all and the the most beautiful part of this whole thing is this little piece right here which might look familiar to you this is from a light fixture now this would normally go in like a ceiling canopy of a piece of decorative lighting and what this allows us to do is offset from using this factory bolt that bolts this wheel on and bolt right into those two holes that our factory come on this piece you don't even need a drill to drill through metal to put this together so let's get into putting this thing together we're going to add a couple pieces of wood and we're just gonna use a wrench to take this apart and put it back together [Music] so we're gonna have to take this little ground screw out of here you won't need that the way the hole in this works is if sort of self centers on this on the round side of this nut so we're just gonna put that on there and then as we tighten it down we're gonna make sure that it's centers itself out nicely now you could get a shim or a washer to put in there to really make it perfect you know if you ground one down it'll be nice I'm gonna make that pretty tight now the action of this is gonna actually be tightening this nut as we go so we don't have to worry so much about it getting loose now the machine can run in Reverse but the motor is only gonna run in one direction so here's where it gets a little bit tricky so now that we have this bolted on there we're gonna put this this pulley directly onto this now there are two threaded points on this and these are threaded for 832 threads and they are just perfect just about perfect to fit on there and I notice with mine was I had to kind of bend mine a little bit now there is this offset there and it does get us exactly how far away we need from this nut but if you bend these leaves a little bit you can kind of stretch them out there a little close so you might need to stretch this a little bit and almost flatten it out just so that you can definitely get there now what I found was you'll need a short bolt about five eighths of an inch long and then what I did was I took a two inch long bolt and I just put a whole bunch of washers on it and this is going to actually replace the handle that we originally had which is another nice feature of this modification is that you're not going to lose the manual capabilities of the machine I'm not gonna make this super tight until I get the second one in there now you don't need to leave this one long if you don't want to but I feel like it makes a nice handle you could get a piece of tubing and put it over this I just have these bolts down there to act as a stop now if you were to leave these screws too long they're just gonna bottom out against this plate and that's why I'm using just a 5/8 length bolt there and then this one has these two nuts to stop it so now you can see the machine essentially functions as it did I'm gonna pull the thread out so I don't make it not but the machine essentially functions exactly the same as it did but now we've added a pulley to the face of this and this is what's gonna make this whole thing possible so this is the variable speed motor that we're gonna be using and this is about 22 bucks on Amazon and this thing is you know it's nothing crazy it's fast it's a 65 or 6,000 rpm motor and it uses this little tiny pulley on it right here and we're gonna utilize that because we're gonna be going from this little tiny pulley to this relatively large pulley and that's what's going to give us a great speed reduction that we're gonna need because 6,000 rpms this thing would blow itself apart it comes with this little foot pedal and you don't need to do any special wiring to get this thing to work you just plug this in push the foot pedal and you're good to go now this obviously needs to be mounted to something so my machine is already mounted to a piece of wood and I'm gonna go ahead and mount it to another piece of wood so I have some room for this motor to sit off to the side this piece right here and the piece that my machine is on or bulk eleven and a quarter inches deep so that'll sit on there nicely and then this piece on the bottom is 24 inches wide and I'm just gonna use some inch and a quarter screws to screw this together now on this side of the machine I need a place to put this motor so what I figure is I'll do a little kind of bracket like this maybe something like that and then the motor can mount into there and I can just use screws again the big thing here is I just want to have some sort of alignment between the center of this pulley and the center of that pulley so if we kind of look at it you know I basically want to be somewhere around there and I'm just gonna screw these pieces down this is just 3/4 inch plywood and I should have a nice sturdy spot to mount this motor all right so now that I'm mounted and I'm generally in alignment it's time to make the belt now this was an important part of this well as understanding that everyone's setup would be different so I got this polyurethane belting this is four millimeters and I bought 10 meters of it which is way more than you need you could buy just a couple feet because we're gonna make a pretty short belt and what's nice about this stuff is that you know if you do buy this much I think this was 13 bucks for 10 meters which is a huge amount but we can just mount the motor and you know essentially gas on the length of the belt and then what we'll do is we'll put in basically one pivot point and then we can pivot it back and tighten it up as we need so now the belt can be tightened if we you know kind of make it a random length and then needs to be a little bit shorter which is what we want we want to be able to put custom tension on it so now we can take this piece of belting while I was kind of testing this out I noticed that the motor wants to spin in this direction it wants to spin clockwise as though you're looking from the back of the motor forward now that wouldn't work for us that would actually run the machine in Reverse now a quick trick to reverse the drive on a motor in a situation like this is to have the belt cross itself now what this is going to do is it's going to reverse the motion that we're getting and that's exactly what we want in this instance so we can run this belt to the end and we can cut it right there and once we seen this back together we should be good I just stabbed myself in the hand with that razor blade good job buddy so we'll just kind of clean this edge up because it's on a little bit of an angle I'll show you how we can join this belt together and make it one so this is just a regular barbecue lighter and what we're gonna do is we're gonna hold this stuff right off the edge of the table we're gonna heat up the very end and then when we're ready we're gonna stick them together and hold them together now obviously I'm pretty close to the end of my wooden table so you're gonna want to be careful but just melt those two ends stick them together I like to rest it on a surface just so they're nice and registered against one another nice and flat we know that they're gonna be lined up you don't want them to be out of alignment but you don't have to do too much to this stuff you hold it together and it's gonna be very very strong I already have made a couple of belts with this stuff and it it's shocking how strong it is considering that you're just kind of making it on your bench now that being said I'm glad that I bought a long long piece of this because if I need to change this set up I know I can just make a couple more belts and maybe if I had some spare time I would just make a couple of belts because if this does snap I don't want to have to make a whole new one I'd like to have a couple on hand for the cost of this it's probably worth doing I only used maybe you know 18 inches of it just now and this stuff is already almost cool now what we do want to do is just take a razor blade and trim some of the excess off of this around the sides we don't want to have this big kind of seam because it's gonna have to run across that little tiny pulley so I'm just gonna take this and just sort of trim it a little bit at a time very carefully making sure not to cut myself or stab myself again and now the smoother we're able to make this the better this whole thing is gonna run exacto knife would probably be better or if you have like this little sander maybe you could just like buzz this on the sander alright so you got my got my belt done you can see how it fits on here now like I said we're gonna want to spin this over which is going to give us that reverse action and that's what's going to allow this thing to run in the proper direction once we give it some power so now I can make this nice and tight you can see how it's already trying to drive that motor and I can put a second screw down here and we're putting that second screw down there is gonna lock the motor in place and it's gonna give me the tension that we're gonna need in order to actually drive this thing alright I think it's time to plug this thing in and see how it does so this little motor comes with a foot pedal and right here there's a little bolt and what this does is it kind of limits the speed now the bolt that came on it was kind of short so I just replaced it with a little bit longer one you're gonna see how fast this thing goes when we plug it in and give it you know give it a little bit of pressure so you're gonna want to limit the speed of this thing as much as you can and it is definitely a little finicky when it comes to running this thing with the motor so now right now I have the thread out of the needle because I don't want a jam the machine by having it trying to make a stitch but let's see you know when I start to push on this pedal motor is gonna try and turn now if I have to adjust this screw which is just gonna give me a little more so you can see I could put a little more motor attention on it I kind of like that it's a little bit loose and I'm really just adjusting this little nut so that I don't go too far so you can see it's a little violent of an action that being said it's still very slow in comparison to what like a commercial fabric stitching machine would run so let's get it threaded up and let's try and run some material through it and see how we do my favorite part of this is that the machine still is able to run manually woops by the way if you have one of these machines and you haven't made yourself a little threading tool this is just some thin wire and if you stick this up through this kind of shuttle here it makes pulling the wire down so much easier I have never been able to actually thread the wire down from the bottom without using this little tool and it took all of two minutes to make so you have one of these or you're gonna get one of these get it yourself a little bit of thin metal wire and look how easy it is to just pull that thread down all right so now the machine is threaded take a piece of leather and throw it in there the presser foot down my foot pedal on the ground and I'm gonna it'll be nice is I'll have two hands to control the piece of material now obviously this thing is really fast so I'm gonna try to be a little careful on the foot pedal let's see how we do see now I can hand stitch for a second get around this corner start my stitch again and then I can hit the pedal and keep going [Music] [Music] let's take a look so like I said it's aggressive but and also the foot on this machine is notably pretty harsh on your leather if you don't soften it up now mine's really sharp I've been meaning to sort of deburr it but you know I just blazed around that piece pretty quickly and with really good control what I noticed is that this thing kind of wants to wander so maybe I'll tighten this up a little bit but let's try and stitch two pieces together and go around the boarder make a little pouch or whatever and see how it does and what I'm noticing is that my the tension on my belt is just enough that sometimes I need to kind of help it along with this but I don't actually mind that because it's giving me kind of a manageable speed so let's do another another shot let's see how we do I might actually throw something to keep this down onto the table because it wants to like run away from me it's gonna screw it down to my bench real quick I guess in theory you could clamp this to your table because the action of it the action of it jumping around is making it kind of want to walk around the table and I don't want it to move now this was my normal sewing bench I could just clamp it down and that would be sufficient so all right so just like that you know like I said this is under fifty dollars worth of stuff the motor is 22 bucks the pulley is 11 bucks the belting depending on how much you buy is between six dollars and fourteen dollars and the little light bracket that's behind the pulley is four bucks you can buy all this on Amazon and you really don't need more than a screwdriver to put this together you know I don't know how running this motor on this machine is going to affect it like I said it's pretty it's pretty violent motion and it's a lot so I keep my machine pretty well lubricated I just use sewing machine oil I put it in here i lubricate all the joints and long-term this thing might just fall apart if you use the motor on it for too long but you know for the stuff that I do to be able to have two hands to control the workpiece and also not be sitting there cranking but still have the ability to forward and back stitch with this still having this pulley face mounted to the original flywheel this is a success in my mind like I said I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do this and I'm really really happy with this so if you buy the machine for 115 bucks spend 50 bucks on the motor and all the other little stuff and get some plywood scraps from like Home Depot or from your local lumberyard you can have yourself a super capable machine that will easily sew two pieces of edge to edge Tim with this machine without problems so I think this is something that everyone should do to their little hand crank sewing machine alright that about does it for this little video I'm really psyched on this I like I said I spent a ton of time combing through Amazon and eBay and thinking about you know did I want to maybe make my own pulleys and sell them to help people motorized this machine on the cheap and coming up with a solution it all just sort of worked together and you know it's about having the experience to think outside the box on something like this so I have a background in kind of home repair and when I was thinking about a way to offset and attach this pulley to this the you know the first thing I was going to do with some sort of coupler nut and then all of a sudden boom it hit me if I use an offset thing from a light canopy that would be perfect and you know I wanted this to be simple I didn't want there to be any electronics involved and yet you could go in and you could get a really nice sawing machine motor that's going to give you a nice low speed and a lot of torque and a lot of guys have so this is sort of do-it-yourself solution and I hope that you guys give it a try if you have any questions please leave them down in the comments below I'm going to put links to where you can get all these components in the description of this video and I am happy to help get you off the ground with this and get it running now like I said be aware this could totally just tear this machine apart if you use it too much it is pretty aggressive it's running really fast it makes a lot of noise and it really jumps around a lot so proceed with caution and also you could very easily hurt yourself by stitching your finger with this machine like any sewing machine because it's running pretty fast and you know just be careful all right if you want to see behind the scenes stuff what I'm doing in the shop on a day-to-day basis follow me here at make everything shop on Instagram I showed the process of kind of putting this thing together and figuring it out so people ask me questions and I like to respond right away and sort of keep the conversation going on Instagram so check me out there if you liked this video give it a thumbs up share with friends and don't forget to subscribe to my channel for more videos using this thing videos in the shop making stuff and yeah I hope you enjoyed it I hope you give this a try and I will see you on the next video thanks

Channel: Make Everything

Views: 290,433

Rating: 4.8830252 out of 5

Keywords: Make, leather, cobbler sewing machine, leather sewing machine, cheap sewing machine, sewing leather, leather craft, how to sew leather, add motor to sewing machine, fisters sewing machine, leather work, maker, hand made, hand crank sewing machine, $115 leather stitching machine, low cost leather sewing machine, sewing machine motor, chinese shoe patcher, how to make a leather sheath, stitching leather, how to stitch leather, make everything, amazon leather sewing machine

Id: r5Cq-ZKKoAA

Length: 23min 16sec (1396 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 24 2020