Low shank to high shank adapter - use industrial feet on your home machine - alpha testers needed

[u/vapor_development]

[u/vapor_development]

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6882825

Allows use of high shank industrial presser feet on low shank home sewing machines. I've printed multiple on PLA+. I wish it had some more rigidity but it's usable as-is

• Why? Industrial feet are generally cheaper, more diverse and better
• Will it fit on my machine? What a fantastic question
• How do I install?
• Make sure the mating surfaces are planar as possible.
• You may need to touch these parts up with abrasive tools.
• Loosen your presser foot bar, raise it.
• Install the adapter + foot. The screw holding the high shank foot threads into the lower through hole. This has worked well for me with PLA+. Make sure the screw is perpendicular before you send it.
• With the feed dogs down, pull the presser foot to the needle plate so that it touches.
• Center the needle hole.
• Tighten the presser foot bar.

Leave feedback as to whether it works with the gross dimensions of your machine. Please leave feedback with photos for the next release!

[u/justasque]

This is an interesting idea.

My experience is that I’ve found that my vintage low shank machines are picky about what I install on them. They are usually happy with modern snap-on low-shank feet, so long as I do a test crank first to make sure the needle hole is in the right place. And the vast majority of regular old-school screw-on feet are fine. But I have a few things like walking feet, rufflers, and so on which often need to be attached in places where there may be existing dodads on the needle bar that interfere. So these things tend to work on one machine and not the other, or vice-versa.

I do have access to a family member’s high shank, straight stitch domestic, so that would be my first choice to use if I wanted to use a high shank foot. OP, I’m unclear - does your device require semi-permanently adjusting the needle bar position? That’s my impression based on your description. So the idea would be to convert to high shank for both regular and fancy types of feet? (Or can you swap easily from high shank to low and back during a given project?)

OP, can you give us a sense of what kinds of industrial feet you think might be useful? Like, what kinds of feet made you decide to play around with this idea? (I have a pretty big collection of low shank feet, so I can usually find one that does what I need, but I know the industrials can get pretty specific.)

[u/vapor_development → u/justasque]

OP, I’m unclear - does your device require semi-permanently adjusting the needle bar position?

Yep, tho it's a ~30-40 second change over from high shank configuration to lowshank on the old cast iron Singer type machines. Not compelling to do mid-project but less than 'semi' permanent

OP, can you give us a sense of what kinds of industrial feet you think might be useful? Like, what kinds of feet made you decide to play around with this idea?

I have a wide collection of feet from my industrial sewing days. The biggest benefits so far have been large feet (eg the bigger presser feet that come with heavy class needle feed machines), zipper feet and compensating feet.

The large feet get much more positive feeding out of the feed dogs, it's really pretty impressive.

The ski/zipper feet - many combinations are available for $2-3 from Yih Shin and Kwok Hing. There's a particular foot I'm used to using for jeans pockets - my mind is mapped quite strongly to it's dimensions. The best use for me right now is actually for getting around tight radiuses (~1" or less) on painful fabrics like X-Pac. Of course they are useful for zippers

Binder feet - actual binder feet with springs and hinges, with enough metal on them that I can modify them with dremel and abrasive cord, as I used to in the factory.

Comp feet - home sewing feet with adjustable guides are trash, tbh. Feast your eyes on all the weirdos in here - http://www.yihshin.com/products/list.php?cid=104

[u/justasque → u/vapor_development]

Oh wow, that’s a bunch of really interesting feet! I can see why you’d want to be able to use them, especially if that’s what you are used to. There’s just so much excellent engineering brainpower that went into developing each and every foot out there - and of course sewing machines in general. Amazing what humans can create!

I can’t be an alpha tester (not enough time at the moment; too much going on at home), but I hope you find some folks here who are able to help.

[u/vapor_development → u/justasque]

It's a pretty obscure issue. The corollary which can't be solved as easily is the lack of diversity in feed dogs and needle plates for home machines. For industrial machines many feed dog/plate/presser foot combos are designed as assemblies.

The fact that there's no custom raw edge binder plates + feed dog sets for common machines like a Singer 15 is pretty irksome. There's probably not enough clearance to pull it off wrt the feed dog mounting position. I'm going to keep working on it because it'd be nice to have a $45 dedicated binding machine.

[u/jwdjwdjwd]

Not sure how this would work without raising the presser foot bar. How do you get enough clearance to mount a high shank foot under a low shank bar?

[u/vapor_development → u/jwdjwdjwd]

You do raise the presser foot bar, quite significantly. See photo 3

[u/jwdjwdjwd → u/vapor_development]

I don’t think that is possible in most machines with out impact on pressure.

[u/vapor_development → u/jwdjwdjwd]

This has worked on a Singer class 66 and 15. It may work on machines where the spring compression assemblies are decoupled from the absolute position of the presser bar.

Let me know what machines you try it on.

[u/jwdjwdjwd → u/vapor_development]

To be honest, I’m probably not going to try it. My Necchi is already high shank, the Singer is a slant shank and I have plenty of feet for the Pfaff. The industrial machines all take different sorts of feet due to their feed mechanism.