Invent Design Make

No don’t try feeding your dog anything metal!  You want to make the sewing machine ‘feed dog’ leaver easily take and hold a saw blade. 

I went about this by making a casting of sorts, from JB Weld.  There are loads of pages out there that that consider this (here is one), so I will not go into too much detail here.

First fill the void in the leaver with epoxy. Then cover a sample of the saw blade with beeswax sot it will not be stuck forever, and set it into the epoxy.  You probably want  to periodically rotate the part to prevent the JB from sagging while drying.  Once dry we can pull out the saw blade, and hay presto, a nice little blade sized holder. Now drill a hole and tread it and we can use a grubscrew tightened against the saw blade to fix it in place.

Now we just need to spring load the leaver to keep the blade in tension – that way it should stay straight and not bend all over the place.  So there would be many different ways to approach this, one could mount a ‘push’ style spring between the leaver and the machine underside, or as I have you can have a twist style spring mounted on the shaft that supports the leaver.  Either make your own from scratch (here is a good DIY spring method) or, as I did, you could probably modify one of the many springs you took away from other bits of the machine.

Epoxy is setting. In the first few hours I had to keep periodically rotating it.

Blade piece removed. Amazingly it came out, no problem, so yeah, recommend rubbing the blade down thoroughly with bee’s wax for easy Arthurian gratification.

I had these coping saw blades, so that is what I used.

Make a twist spring like this to keeps the blade in tension.