Treadles are the bee's knees (I have two, an early Singer 206k and a lovely Jones Medium C.S.). My main machine is a hand-cranked Frister and Rossmann vibrating shuttle from 1911 which belonged to my great great aunt, then there's the other hand-cranked Jones Medium and the '60s Bernina. The old straight stitchers with vibrating shuttles are really the gold standard for stitching quality in my opinion, particularly for topstitching. The lack of rotation of the bobbin means there's no twist on the lockstitch so each one sits directly behind the other. On a modern rotary bobbin machine the needle holes may be in line, but the stitch itself will be slightly diagonal between them.
I find a hand-crank so much more controllable than an electric machine, even a stepping industrial one. The ability to adjust stitch length on the fly with a lever means it's very easy to finish needle-down exactly on the spot you want, and single-hole needle plate gives the best support for the fabric. They're also so heavily built that repair is almost always possible except in cases of extreme industrial wear, and even then they were made in so many millions (if Singers or clones) that spares are readily available.
It gets my goat that people dump machine heads from treadle tables in order to put some grim bit of worktop on and try to sell it as just a table.
I find a hand-crank so much more controllable than an electric machine, even a stepping industrial one. The ability to adjust stitch length on the fly with a lever means it's very easy to finish needle-down exactly on the spot you want, and single-hole needle plate gives the best support for the fabric. They're also so heavily built that repair is almost always possible except in cases of extreme industrial wear, and even then they were made in so many millions (if Singers or clones) that spares are readily available.
It gets my goat that people dump machine heads from treadle tables in order to put some grim bit of worktop on and try to sell it as just a table.
