harnessman

Hi Well, since nobody else seems to want to chime in here I guess I will. First off let me commend you on setting your sights high. Way too much crap out there that is slapped togeather, dolled up and peddled only to be discarded when it fails to hold up. Every craftsman should strive to make the best possible articles with sound construction and materials before they add on the bangle or carve up a storm. Your questions are much like what is the best vehicle and beget as many questions as answers. Huge difference between a wallet and a messenger bag with pretty much totally different skill levels and material requirements. Secondly, you better reconsider the no dying, carving or decorating thing. You will wind up doing all of them to one extent or another if you really plan on making anything anyone else will want to use or buy. You can make the best wallet in the world that will last forever but if it is ugly no one will even look at it much less buy it. Decoration is not just the application of sparkles and bangles or carving pretty flowers, it is also part of the design process that makes a item usefull as well as beutifull. A slightly flared seam or constrasting stitch may be "only usefull" and inheretly part of the design but it also adds "Decoration" to the end product. Chosing a particular section of hide with a nicer, more eye apealing, structure or pattern may not add anything to the thrength of the bag but you will appreciate that eye appeal every time you look at the bag. 1.) Depends, each has different characteristics and strengths and weaknesses. Browse the LEATHER section on the Forum for good information on leather types. 2.) Roo is good stuff for some applications. Great for wallets and whips, bit lacking for heavy duty satchels in my oppinion - some of our members down under may dissagree. It is also rather pricy compared to cow and is not available in anywhere near as many choices as cow. 3.) Yes, and no, it depends on your skill level and what you are trying to accomplish. Linings can be an effective part of a bag structure providing reinforcement and preventing wear on the exterior leather. In some cases they are cosmetic only, hidding rough or unsightly conditions on the flesh side of the outer layer. Choice of linning materials should be as carefully considered as the choice of the exterior leather. 4.) Depends. If your straps are lined, which they should be on high quality items, stitching obviously hold the layers togeather. Sometimes stitching is used as a decorative item and it will impart some strength to the strap, but don't count on it in a pinch! There is a school of thought that proclaims that everytime you poke a hole in leather you are weakening it to one extent or another. 5.) GOOD Nylon and Poly are the modern choice of a lot of leatherworkers. Readily available and moderately inexpensive either are much stronger than their older counter parts. Some swear by Poly others only use Nylon. Talk to the thread people and the differnces become much less obvious. Basically nylon is stronger and does not streatch as much (marginally) but poly is more water resistant and stretchier, which can be a good thing. However as in many things you get what you pay for and there are good synthetic threads and bad. There is also something to be said for good old fashioned flax or linnen thread. Personally there is no other thread that looks as good on a hand stitched article than good old waxed linen thread. Some people will tell you that it is not as strong or as durable as synthetics, both empirically true but then again any of them are stronger than the leather you are attaching them to! Also I have worked on 100 year old pluss harness that was stitched with linnen that is just as strong as it was when new but the leather has rotted away around it. I have also seen almost new harness with synthetic thread that has melted away because the ill advised owner used god knows what to "clean" their leather! Again, do a little research on the Forum and you will fiind out a lot about threads. 6.) Not much help on this one since I am on the wrong side of the pond. I have been working with leather in one form or another for over 40 years and still consider myself a novice and learn new stuff about the craft every day, and I only dabble in a very small area. Welcome aboard, learn and most of all enjoy our craft regardless of what you make Jim D.

Hi Heavy Old World type Harness Leather is about the closest thing you can get to water resistant leather because of the fats and waxes that it is impregnated with. Good Harness Leather, Herman Oak or W&C is darn near water proof, but you can not effectively carve the stuff because those same waxes and oils will refuse to hold a carved pattern, unless you are just happy with a "cut" pattern and no relief work. Skirting or carving leather carves beutifully, or course, but will suck up water like a sponge unless it is treated with a wax, acrilyc or other surface finish to resist water, which will have to be redone. A close second would be English Bridle leather, but it suffers in the carving department because it is also treated with fats and waxes as the harness leather, just not as much. Third choice would be Latigo, which is somewhat impregnated with various oils that give it the typical "Latigo" feel and will help it resist water penetration to some extent, but not as good as the #1 and #2 choices. Oil tanned, which is somewhat of a misnomer as oil allone will not tan anything, is oil impregnated pretty much the same as Latigo just processed differently to make it a closer cell less streatchy leather. Neither oil tann or latigo make very good candidates for carving. Jim

Hi All I thougth that was what E-bay was for - if you are lucky you can at least recoup your material cost and chalk the time up to experience. Jim

Yes, just type in Joseph Dixon in the search and you will get their web site. Lots of good useable tools, but they are on the wrong side of the puddle and cost a fortune to ship. Personally I like the shape of the Osborne English end punches better than the Weaver punches. The Weavers tend to be shorter for the width of the belt and not as appealing to my eye. The Weaver punches are certainly much prettier and lighter to handle, make the Osborne punches look like crude boat anchors by comparison, but in the 40+ some years that I have been using them I certainly have had no problems with the Osborne punches, though maybe that is because they are mostly 30 some years old! Jim D.

Hi Andy Any Idea what you want for them? Thanks Jim

That is what the name plate on mine states as well. Sucker looks like it was put togeather by Rube's younger evil twin. Turn it on and blades whirr, belts flap, gears grumble and spit lubricant everywhere! Feed a piece of leather onto the inocent looking feed drum and it will grab it and whisk the leather and any fingers holding it, into the razor sharp blade! One of the scariest pieces of mechanical equipment I have in the shop and it sits right next to the American Straight needle sewing machine, of about the same vintage, that likes to grab fingers and flick them right under the needle and into the path of the awl which apears like if by magic from the bottom side of the piece being stitched! Fun stuff old leather machinery! Jim

I don't know if you do E-bay but there is one out there right now item #300480383075. Same machine that I picked up last summer from a local shoe repair company. It works pretty good on upholstery weight leather.

Hi Glenn In the boot and bag trades where this is commonly done they have a machine much like a power skiver that shaves the leather to exactly half its thickness and leaves a little step so that the folded edge lays exactly flush with the original thickness of the leather. You can do almost the same thing with a power bell skiver but it is more difficult to get it set just right so the lap disappears. It can be done by hand, but on streatchy thin leather it requires an extraordinarily sharp knife and an incredible amount of patience! Jim D.

Actually, I am betting with Kevin that these are not split rivets but rather solid rivets with burrs, made for these particular pieces of hardware especially since the hardware, and what I can see of the surrounding bags, look like pretty good quality stuff. I use Escutcheon Pins, in both brass and SS all the time as small rivets to hold plates on leather straps. They are available in a fair variety of sizes, length, dia of shaft and dia of head. They can easily be snipped to any length required and a burr, small brass washer, used on the back side to spread the load out. The key to getting a nice head on them is to use a propper "Rivet Set" tool for the size of the pin, or being very, very good with a small ball peen hammer. Personally I think a well done solid rivet looks much better than split (Bifurcated) rivets and they certainly hold much better. But that is just MHO Jim D.

Hi All I recently picked up a nice shrunken Bison hide for use in making some bags and belts and stuff. It is interesting to work with, very tough leather but streatchy. It is chrome tanned and the biggest problem I am having is getting a decent finish on the edges I have tried the Gum T. routine, it just fuzzes right back up. Any suggestions would be gratefully accepted. Thanks Jim

Hi Ritch This summer I did pretty much the same thing for the same reasons. However I started out with a old Chicago Cuttlery Chef's knife that I picked up at a rummage sale for 50 cents. I whacked of 5-1/2 inches from the pointy end and shaped half of it for a full tang handle. Scales are from a bit of hard maple that I had sitting around epoxied to the tang, LIttle bit of sanding, bit of oil, and it looked pretty decent. The 420 SS holds a pretty good edge and it only takes a couple of strokes on the Surgical Arkansas stone to keep it that way. It is a lot handier than some of my other knives and is slowly becomming my main cuttter for skiving and lots of other stuff. Don't you just love making your own tools, especially when they work better than what you can buy! Jim

Hi The Hide House in California carries a lot of pretty nice buffalo, but I do not think they cary anything that could be tooled. The samples I have are all for bag type leather. Jim

Hi Thanks! I figgured that the thickness had to be just a little over the .45 of the round. Also a big thanks to K-MAN for your genrous offer to send me a clip to work with. I should be ok with just the dimmentions. Jim

HiI am hoping that someone out there can help me out with this one. I have a customer who wants me to build him a dual clip holder for a 1911 seven round clip. Unfortunately I said yes before I discovered that the guy has some difficulty reading a tape measure! Can someone out there give me a dimension for a clip? Height, width, depth, and angle of the bottom/top. I plan to make a wood dummy to form the leather around. Supposedly it is 5-1/8" long and 1-7/16 front to rear and 1-1/2 " wide, which seems to be awfully wide for a single stack clip. Obviously I am not familiar with this gun so I do not know. Any help would be appreciated.ThanksJim

Hi That is a great old machine and will do for a lot of the type of work that you are describing. However it is a high speed industrial sewing machine and, as you have already found out, blazing fast! The first thing I would do to it is put a speed reducer on it, then throw the clutch motor out and put one of the DC servo motors on it. That will tame the beast down to manageable levels and give you a lot more punching power and control for leather work. Just for grins and giggles here is a thread that I posted recently on an alternative, cheap, way to slow these speed demons down. http://leatherworker.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=26086 Finally, expect a learing curve, and a few busted needles, untill you learn to run your new machine. It also helps if you can get a maintainance manual on that specific model you you can learn to keep it in propper adjustment. Not hard to do if you have a bit of mechanical aptitude and a little patience, and a lot cheeper than calling the mechanic every couple of months to fine tune it. JMHO Jim

Hi Marty I went through the same agony about three years ago. I was getting way behind on work doing everything by hand, needle and awl. I knew that in order to keep competitive and grow I needed a machine, but which one. Based on current work at the time I had a real hard time justifying the $2K of the large harness machines, much less the $4-$5K of a good Campbell or Adler. I finally settled on one of the big cylinder arm stitchers commonly know as a class 4 or Juki 441 clone from China/Taiwan/Japan. Got fits from the wife about spending that much money on a new sewing machine for my "hobby". Let me tell you that without any reservations it is the best investment I have ever made in a piece of machinery. That big sucker has paid for itself many times over and has allowed me to get into work that would have been virtually impossible without it. There are very few projects that can not be handled by that cylinder arm. Flat work, no problem, takes me about 30 seconds to attach my home made flat table. Round work, that would be almost impossible to do on a conventional needle and awl machine is a cinch with the cylinder. Box stitching, not a problem with the right attachments. 3/4" thick traces 72" long, piece of cake, I can now sew up a set, double line stitched, in about 1/2 hour where it used to take me a week to do by hand. Then, with a few adjustments, I can sew thin 7-8 oz belts laying down a beautiful consistent stitch that frankly rivals hand stitching and is soooo much faster. There is a learning curve with the big stitchers, as there is with any machine, but once you get the hang of it they are amazing. I personally see no need for all the fancy needle positioning crap that they are currently hanging on them that drive the cost up. It did not take me long at all to figure out how to put one stitch at a time where I wanted it and stop the needle up, or down, or any where in between. Oh, I have also worked with Post type machines, we have lots of them in the upholstery shop at work, and they are pretty much a specialty machine and not all that versatile. They are pretty limiting as to what you can do with them compared to a cylinder arm. If you only have room, or budget, for one machine bite the bullet, get the cylinder arm, you will not regret it. JMHO Jim

Hi Unfortunately it did not occur to me to take pictures of the process, sorry. Pretty simple though, First I removed the pulley from the end of the drive shaft of the sewing machine. Then layed out four holes, the Singer pulley had a nice convenient flat already machined on the outboard end of the pulley so it made it easier. Drilled and tapped the holes in the pulley. The tricky part is to propperly alighn, concentricity counts, the small pulley in relation to the large one. I did it by placing the large pulley on the small one and spinning them untill they were centered, then clamp them togeather and used the holes in the pulley to mark the location of holes in the large pulley. By the time I was al done with it I was about 1/16 or so off and the pulley wobbles a little, but it really does not seem to make much difference to the actual opperation of the machine. I did not use any spacers, just four grade 5 bolts and washers to hold the two togeather. The belt alighnment was not an issue, again the extra long belt and angles compensate pretty much for that, The clutch motor pulley moves in and out anyway and the motor was ofset slightly to begin with to compensate for that movement. I did have to carve a much larger slot in the table to allow for the larger belt angles. Hope this helps. Jim

Hi Most needle and awl shoe machines that I have run into use a square awl for shoe work, not a round awl with chisle point. Campbell, Randle, etc machines made for the saddle or harness trade use round awls sharpened on two sides to make a traditional slit shape. Also the shank of the awl for a old american or landis shoe machine may or may not fit thehole in the needle bar on your machine. Jim

Hi Because of the variable nature of the stuff I order from Weavers it is hard to get a straight answer out of them on shipping, especially when you order hides. Since I have been keeping closer track of their shipping lately I have also noticed that when you order stuff they always ship in their standard brown "stock" boxes via private carrier and charge primo prices. When they ship back orders, which they do on their own nickle they ship the cheapest way, USPS Priority flat rate boxes, which they can cram a lot of weight into and ship cheap. Why don't they use this relatively inexpensive shipping service for their regular shipments? Jim

Hi Get a piece of drill rod (good tough high carbon steel) the proper dia. to fit in the needle hole in your machine, cut to length required and sharpen the end to a chisle "V" end. Biggest trick is to keep the wedge shape perfectly centered so it does not drift when punchin the slots. Any decent machine shop can make you a dozen of these pretty inexpensively if you do not have the tooling and/or knowledge to do it yourself. Hope this helps Jim

Hi Fleet Farm really does not sell that much stuff on line. At TSC the link is http://www.tractorsupply.com/agriculture-farming-ranching/hubs-sprockets-chains/hubs/weasler-pulley-1-5-8-in-id-x-10-in-od-4300135 They really do hide them well! Hope this works for you. Jim

Hi It is a Hubless weld on stamped steel pulley used around here in Wisconsin on farm equipment. I bought the pulley at Mills Fleet Farm, the local farm supply store. You can also find them at any farm implement dealer. If you do not have a farm implement store handy you can probably find them on line at TSC (tractor supply co.) Jim

Yea, about that, did I mention that the clutch motor is 3/4hp to boot, punching power is not a problem ! I ran a 12 oz piece of sole leather thorugh with #24 leather point needle and 277 thread just to see what it would do it and it just happily chunk, chunk, chunk's right through it. Nice thing is that the original pulley is still on the machine and when I feel the need for speed, like last weekend when I did some seat covers for a customer, I just put the original shorter belt back on and away we go! Jim

Hi All Here is a little different approach to slowing down a way to fast upholstery machine. I got this hardly ever used Singer 211 machine for a song a while ago, complete with 1750 rpm clutch motor, but no table. I finally got around to building a table and getting it set up to sew. Right of the bat the thing is wicked FAST! I think the Singer book lists it at something like 2900 stitches per minute which on leather is way WAY to fast - I could stitch right of the end of a wallet before I could get my foot off the pedal! I replaced the 4.5" motor pulley with the smallest pulley available, I think it is a 2" and while manageable it is still way faster than I wanted. I tried a step down intermediate pulley but with the clutch motor the two belts in the system seemed sluggish and not very controllable, and it still was stitching faster than I wanted. I am very happy with the 300 spm that my big harness stitcher runs and that is the range I wanted with the little Singer, so I could put one stitch at a time exactly where I want it. My solution, which I have not seen mentioned on the forum was to bolt a monster 10" industrial pulley on to the cast iron machine pulley. A little careful layout work and tapping the 1/4" holes in the cast iron pulley and this thing just purrs along. I use 138 thread and #22 needles and it just powers through anything I can get under the foot. The big pulley also makes it much easier to hand turn the machine to carefully place stitches into the corners. Works great for me anyway and only cost me about 1/2 hour in the shop and $12.00 for the 10" pulley. Jim

Weavers handles brass Lacing Tacks in several sizes. Page 117 in my catalog. Jim