I have a Singer 95-40 that came to me with a motor mounted onto the lug under the handwheel, but the motor had taken a “hit” and was broken. It was obviously an add-on by a user. Something that someone cobbled together, including the bracket. I don’t recall ever seeing an original Singer lug-mounted motor on these type machines, but there has to be a reason for the lug.
I know a lady in Arkansas that mounted a regular 12.5” flywheel in her Singer industrial treadle stand, and used two pitman rods clamped together for added length, in which she operated a 1969 Bernina machine. She said that other than being a tad noisy, it worked just fine, but she wasn’t sure the arrangement would power an industrial machine. She recently obtained a 16” flywheel (normal size) to exchange with the smaller wheel, but hasn’t made the conversion yet. I’m curious what the speed and torque differences will be, because I have an industrial stand that I want to try the small flywheel in for an industrial machine, hoping to have a slower speed but adequate power.
I saw a YouTube video of a fellow that removed the 16” flywheel from his Singer industrial stand, and installed the flywheel off of his Singer 29 Patcher in its place trying to reduce the speed of a Singer 31K, but I’m not sure how well it worked. The flywheel of a Singer 29 has two pulleys, an 8.5” and a 10”. He was using the 8.5” pulley in his video. I had some doubts about some of the rest of his video, so I took the whole video with a grain of salt.
As far as piercing power, I can’t give much of an opinion on that, since I’ve not used more than one machine for the same project. Plus, I’m mostly sewing light-weight vinyl and canvas, so punching power is not an issue. Obviously, when sewing seams or hems made up of several layers, the needle does need more oomph to push it through, but I don’t know how one power method would compare to another without sewing the exact same thing on multiple machines.
CD in Oklahoma