What is your technique for machine sewing across narrow Sewing Machines Parts and Sales in Los Angeles

I do some production sewing on a small scale, and I’d love to find a way past the current bottleneck in my process. My finishing step is folding over and then stitching down a raw strap end to form a loop around some hardware. The strap is a flattened, inverted tube about .75″/1.9cm across. Currently I still do this last step by hand – hopefully you can see what I mean in this image:

http://imgur.com/t9yIk4R

The top shows the end folded over twice. The bottom shows how I currently hand-stitch the end down (two sturdy stitches along one side, a blind stitch along the folded edge, then two more stitches along the other side.)

On similar mass-produced items, ends are typically finished with just a couple of lines of stitching straight across. I’ve tried to do this multiple times on a couple of different home machines and it never goes well; because the area under the presser foot is both small and thick, the feed dogs have trouble grabbing it consistently, which causes things to skew out of alignment and also often leads to birds nests of tangled thread underneath. Power is not the problem; although the machines I’ve tried are home models, they are solid metal tanks from the 1950s-60s that can handily sew through those layers – it mostly seems to be a matter of getting it to feed smoothly. I feel like a straight stitch plate might help a bit, but my hunch is that this is one of those things that there’s probably a specialized industrial machine for.

Doing it by hand is a slog and currently the main thing limiting my potential output; any tips/tricks/ideas on how to do this cleanly and consistently on a machine would be much appreciated!