AEBL

Frankly, "Bruce said it was a good idea" is good enough for me!

I would imagine Resolene was your problem all along. What part is getting clogged, the nozzle? Usually IPA does a great job on Fiebings pro dye - I clean up with IPA, then for storage I run US Airbrush Supply "airbrush cleaner" through it. I have seen guys doing Cerakote cleaning up with acetone, but that's hard on your O-rings. Just don't use anything with ammonia in it - ammonia corrodes brass (your airbrush is likely chrome-plated brass, most are). If you do notice that your O-rings are fat or mushy, you could try to change out some of them to PTFE (Teflon). PTFE is harder to dissolve, but isn't indestructable. If it is your needle that is getting gunked up, I sometimes put some Brasso, Flitz, etc. on the end of a shop rag, chuck up my needle in a drill, and slowly spin it while pinching it. Don't do that long, it does remove material, but if your needle is really gunked up, that's better than buying a new needle. Be careful - needle obviously sharp and delicate.

You probably know about as much as I do, but sometimes I have luck trying to see if an old off-brand airbrush is a Badger clone, or an Iwata clone, etc. From there you can see if the parts thread together. I got a box of "parts" from an estate sale and was able to put together two Harbor Freight Badger clones and an Iwata Eclipse. The rest of the parts were for a "Master Airbrush" ... and are sometimes Badger-y and sometimes Iwata-y. They were all siphon feed and used for dyes. US Airbrush Supply has "Master" parts. Iwata parts are more common, I have them at my local Hobby Lobby (but they are *expensive* parts). It's also possible to homebrew your own flow reducer, airbrush cleaner, etc., but for leather dyes I wind up just using isopropyl alcohol and then US Airbrush Supply airbrush cleaner. Oh - some magnifying visors can be super helpful in cleaning/inspecting airbrushes ... sometimes weird flow stuff can be caused by an almost invisible dent in the nozzle, or some fleck of stuff on the needle.

I'll bet that there will be water in whatever you're rendering from the chicken fat. The easiest way to get rid of that is to put it in a container in the refrigerator. The fat will solidify leaving the water behind to drain. The liquid fat can sometimes be hard to draw through filter paper. You may want to get yourself a cheap vacuum filter (has a hand vacuum pump, got mine on Amazon for not much money). I tried this with raw shea butter and it worked pretty well, chicken fat is less viscous, so should work really well. Might work easiest if you rendered it, vacuum filtered it, then refrigerated it to remove the water? After that, if you wanted it even more pure, you might try sparging it with air and an aquarium bubbler. That would get rid of some of the smoky/cooking smells.

Ok - I will think about this for a bit. If I remember, I'll post pictures of what I wind up doing for constructive criticism

I have an order for a knife sheath, pancake style, for a knife that the customer provided for me to use in custom fitting. I have made sheaths for things, and I know that a welt is a good thing to protect the stitches. I've found a few patterns for pancake style sheaths, but they usually seem to be two pieces of leather glued together and stitched ... with no welt. I was thinking three layers? the middle layer is the welt?

The thing on the left is a swivel knife sharpening jig. The thing in the center, .

You asked a similar question elsewhere, but try this: https://www.libertyleathergoods.com/leather-cord/

If you're using a drill press, be careful applying pressure radially to the bearings (i.e. pressure in the plane of the support table). This will likely cause your bearings to wear out if you do that a lot. Drill presses are designed for "up and down" pressure, but not "left and right" or "forwards and backwards" pressure. Some sharpening systems use a spinning disk are probably fine (basically up and down pressure), but using a drill press as a drum sander is not recommended.

I googled "waxed leather cord" and found a lot of stuff that looked like it could be used for necklaces ... where else did you look? Etsy had a lot of them also.

If the O-ring looks like your usual O-ring (i.e., like a tiny donut), you could go to Harbor Freight and get one of their O-ring packs and see if any of them are close enough. Other than that, you could find a machinist supply company near you and see if they had something there that would fit - just bring the old O-ring with you.

@BlackDragon, I didn't realize you could ask for that! Thanks.

The profile fragments are sort of neat, "what are you interested in," etc. ... but if you look at the size of most posts on the forum, the vertical space is *mostly* taken up with the profile fragment on the left-hand side of the post. If that were reduced to something like "where I am from" ... and the rest of it moved to the profile page, you'd get more posts-per-page.

I visited Darwin once to see the saltwater crocs ... very impressive creatures, and, now I know that they make great wallets too!

This is a picture from the "Hahns Atelier" YouTube channel. I think it was "how to make a leather clutch bag" or something like that. He used some leather zipper tabs. One side covered the entire zipper tape, which I had seen done before. The other side near the "closed" zipper side, was two separate pieces of leather. The design seems to work well, but is asymmetric, I guess. I was wondering what the reasoning might be for making the tab two separate pieces instead of one tab? In the picture, it is the top left.

@AlZilla, I haven't tried animated SVG files or custom JavaScript ... often I find that anything more than just the simple text is just too much. I hadn't edited HTML or CSS in quite a while though, I used to make (really terrible) websites for people (for free). I guess now I spend my time hijacking peoples posts on how to store leather jackets.

Crisp and clean! I like it very much.

Oh, thanks!, @AlZilla

Very nice!

How did you get your text to show up as black background with white letters??

Clear shoe polish? Honestly, looks fine to me though. My products tend to not look like high-end designer goods though. I don't spend a lot of time trying to not use the bug bites, scuffs and scratches that are on the hide, or the errant scratches that make it onto my piece even though I try very hard to be careful with it. I know that I'm going to use the heck out of it anyhow.

When stuck on ideas of what to make, sometimes I just watch people around me and try to figure out if there is something that they're doing, that would be better with something I might be able to make. Wife had a great idea recently and didn't even realize that what she said gave me the idea. Sometimes these ideas start out as gifts for other people I know. When I just get in a slump making new things, or new skills, because I'm worried that it might be slightly messed up when I'm done ... I just try to not focus on perfection, but realize that it is all a process, and that perfection is a direction, not a destination. Also, if leather is just making me frown, I try to focus on learning something else for a while, like wood, or metalworking or something. They all wind up being related, getting better at wood or metal likely makes you a more well-rounded craftsperson anyhow.

Yeah - and I called his shop, twice. First time I left a message, second time the call was declined.

@MarlinDave, like AlZilla said, for sure, do the math ... size your stitched area for ~ 50% more weight than you figure the maximum weight it should carry (a "safety factor"). @kgg, glad you had backup! I suppose another variable is "shock loading"

She'll be happy about her bag being safe-ish for lugging all of the stuff she lugs around, for sure. I'm seeing how much of an engineering problem this is ... and I'm liking it more. Makes me want to set up some stitch samples and a set of weights and take some failure data. I'm sure it also depends on tannage and thickness somewhat. Very neat.