WyomingSlick

Sure, it's okay to layer leather..........for some purposes. Look at the heel of a cowboy boot. Those are made from a lot of layers bonded together. The best cue tips for billiard/pool cues are made from layers of bonded leather. Some people make belts with a liner bonded/sewn to the outer tooled layer. Many purses are made with a stiffener bonded in between the outer layer, and the lining material. About your purse. Is this something that you are going to tool first? Do you want the purse to be stiff or supple? Bonding leather together will result in a more rigid result just as plywood is stiffer than regular wood. Of course the adhesive you use, and the thickness of it, will affect the result as well. If you are thinking of bonding the layers together and then trying to tool it as if it was 5-6 ounce leather, I have serious doubts about the feasibility of that. If you simply want a more rigid structure for your purse, then I don't see any big problem. It wil actually be much the same as building a leather lined purse, the only differance being that your lining is thicker than the conventional liner.

That alone suggests that you may have dulled the blade to start with. Did you try the blade before stropping it? Some blades are not really sharp enough when they come out of the factory and may require a tune-up before use. As Electrathon stated above, stropping is not really to sharpen the blade. And done improperly, will actually dull the blade. If you were stropping on a piece of leather impregnated with jelwers rouge, and using too much pressure, it is very likely that you rounded over the cutting edge, thus dulling the knife for cutting purposes. Stropping is more of a polishing process used to keep the blade clean and reduce drag. Leather contains oils and resins which are a bit "sticky" and will build up on your blade thus inhibiting a smooth passage through the leather. Actually, that is the main purpose of wetting the leather (casing) prior to carving. The water weakens the connective matter which creates the bond between the leather particles, and makes it much easier for the blade to separate them, that is, to cut them apart. This weakening, caused by moisture, is the very same reason that a piece of wet leather is much easier to fold and mold than a piece of dry leather. Of course this is the same reason that we tool with damp leather So, back to stropping. A polished smooth blade that is sharp will not only cut through leather better,.....it is less liable to pick up stcky residue from the leather. When it does develop some drag from build up, a few careful strops will remove the gunk. I reccomend that for stropping, a quality business card impregnated with stropping compound, and laid on a hard smooth surface works fine. Lawyers and other professionals are a good source for high quality linen paper cards. LOL If you have money to spare, a brand new dollar bill works real well. When you strop, always strop with the sharp edge trailing. Maintain the angle of the blade the same as the sharpening angle, You do not need a lot of pressure because you are not sharpening the blade....you are only cleaning and polishing it. A few strokes on each side should be sufficient. I would not be too concerned with the small wrinkles. After all, that is why you should be using a modeling tool as the final step in your tooling process...to smooth out any irregularities like those. It is much more important that you have a free moving sharp blade to cut in the design with because that is the foundation for everything that comes after. It is very difficult to bevel a crooked line.....straight.

Hmmmm. sounds to me like this is a conversation you should be having with the buckle owner. Is it possible to bend the post to make a curve in it? If it is a cast piece, can the post be filed, or ground to make it hook more. In any case, it is something for you and the buckle owner to work out.

Sold ! sending email now

Another answer would be when you skive the end of the buckle end, make the belt 3 inches longer and skive the end that extra three inches in addition to the buckle fold area. This would be particularly nice if you tool the keeper(s) to match the belt as the keeper will tool and dye identical to the rest of the belt. Then when you are ready to burnish your edges, all you have to do it cut the keepers free and burnish them with the belt.

My opinion is that the ELBO and CHATSWORTH names on the tools is probally not to identify the maker but rather the original owner who made the tools for himself, or had them made for him. Kinda like amputating the legs so the tool wouldn't walk off on him, if you know what I mean. LOL I would guess your Cal-Carved unplated tools are from very early in their production. From everything I've seen, CRAFTOOL was the first to start offering chrome-plated stamps, but I am sure that Cal-Carved soon followed their example. The other possibility is that according to Ron Ross from IILG is that due to chromium being a critical war material, many tools made during the Korean War were not chrome-plated. However, I have never seen anything to indicate that Cal-Carved tools were still in production then. By the way - Regarding magnetism. Most stainless steel tools do exhibit some magnetism. All of my Hackbarth stamps are stainless but the degree of magnetism in them varies from very slight to about half of that of a Craftool. Even a Barry King tool does have some magnetism although it is very slight. The one CRAFTJAPAN stainless beveler I have seems to have perhaps even a little bit less than the King tool.

Excellent work - you make Wyoming proud!

Like many kids who started in 4-H leather, my first item was a bookmark. At the time I thought it looked fine, but then what does a nine year old know. The second year in 4-H leathercraft I made this wallet for my Dad which he kept all these years and never used. It received a blue ribbon at county fair and I thought it was fine. The amusing thing was when I got it back when my Dad died, the mistakes in it jumped right out at me. There were two mistakes in the lacing which I did correct, but otherwise it is just as I made it in 1966. Probably the most glaring is the omission of beveling/matting around the flowers of the cacti. And then today, I would not matt in the clouds as heavily as I did then.

JB Weld is a product I have used for years to fix broken metal when welding/brazing wasn't feasible.

Sounds to me like it is just a problem of communication. In this case it is because of an economy of words. "Handmade" by itself is too ambiguous. How about replacing it with something along the line of "HANDMADE INDIVIDUALLY BY A CRAFTSMAN" OR "ORIGINAL HANDMADE BY THE ARTIST"??

Ah, the old Ellis Barnes iron ! ELBO ? Haven't run across any of those yet. Or the Chatsworth. I do have a couple of stamping tools that Ellis did put the name "BARNES" on though. At least in the early years, Ellis did seem to use the same tool configuration whether he was making tools for Cal-Carved, RBS, or with his name on them. As can be seen in the attached photo, they all were a bit shorter than Craftools, and the knurling was carried closer to the end of the shaft. This was allright for the Cal-Carved and his name since the name went around the shaft, rather than along it. You can see where the number carried into the knurling on some of the RBS tools. Do the names of the ELBOs and Chatsworths run along the shaft or around it? Could you post some pics of the tools ?

A Craftool Mystery While collecting Craftools, one of the mysteries I have encountered is the case of the # 519. In one of my tool aquisitions I received a geometric that was not marked with a number, but did have the CRAFTOOL CO marking. Upon comparison with the numbered Craftools of the same type, I found that it fit into the series #518 to #523 in the spot taken by the # 519, which is the smallest companion to the # 524 - 527 series. ( Open atttached pic in new window ) So the question is whether both series consisted of six various sized tools in the days before they started numbering them? Is there perhaps another tool of the same size as the un-numbered one I have, that fits into the the series represented by the #519 and the #524-527 series? Or was it just a case of Craftool developing tools and they ran into a lack of available numbers? The numbering system that Craftool, RBS, Cal-Carved, and Midas all used was developed by......nobody knows, for sure. The 1946 Cal-Carved and 1947 Craftool Catalogs are the earliest known use of the numbering system that I know of. A curious thing about those catalogs is that a careful comparison of the stamp images in both catalogs show that they are the same images. So what does that signify? Did both take their images from another source? Or, did Craftool take over Cal-Carved about that time? In any case, Cal-carved tools seem to have ceased production about that same time as the latest copyright date on their pattern books seems to be in 1948.

Hi Cyrus, Nice to see some more pics of your old tools and blanks. I am pretty certain that your stuff dates from the 1955 to 1960 period since the oak leaves first appeared in the 1955 catalogs. This would also agree with the time frame for the RBS tools. RBS seems to have appeared before the time that the founder of Craftool, Dick McGahen , died in the late 50's. Lou Roth, the " R " in RBS, then took over Craftool until it was sold to Tandy in the early 60"s. And yes, it would seem that the same machinists were making both Craftool and RBS tools. One of those toolmakers would have been Ellis Barnes ( The B in RBS ), who also made tools for Cal-Carve, a predecessor company of Craftool in the 1940's. Ellis Barnes is the fellow who later bought out Ray Hackbarth's name and operation after Ray died. I think that stamp making as far as those early machinists were concerned was an evolving process. The very earliest tools were only minimally forged by hand prior to machining on a lathe and fine grinders. They may have even used bolts as many early toolmakers ( and some today ) do for their starting points. Some may have been flattened out on the end to make the wider tools like veiners and large backgrounders. Some may have even been upset to make larger heads. That may be the source of the two lines on the heads in your second picture. The tools would have been formed in a 2-piece die which could be opened to remove the tool after it was upset. After Tandy aquired Craftool and moved the operation from California to Texas, the toolmaking process became more industrialized and more and more operations were done on machines, and less and less by skilled machinists. A purview of old Tandy Catalogs show that they stopped touting the hand made angle and ceased mentioning "Quality Control", I don't think very many of their experianced toolmakers moved to Texas with them. I do know that Oliver Sturdy and his brother did. Oliver became the manager for Craftool manufacturing after McGahen died, and continued to work for Craftool in Texas until his retirement. I know a lot of people like to bash Craftools now, and that is somewhat justified when you look at the drop in quality as compared to the older vintage Craftools. But, the fact is that Craftool is still in business and has provided tools to millions of people over the years at an affordable price. Consider thatin the 1950's, a Craftool would cost about a dollar and a half on the average. This was equivalent to the average hourly working man wage at that time. Craftools today cost less than the average hourly working wage, to put that into perspective. And, on eBay, you can pick up many of those old "better" Craftools at bargain prices.

Hi, Welcome to leatherworker.net. Glad to hear from someone else who appreciates how much better the really old craftools from the 50's were than the more recently made ones. After Tandy bought out Craftool in the early 60's, it seems like it was just one big slide downhill from there. You may be interested in viewing my blog here on leatherwork.net http://leatherworker.net/forum/index.php?app=blog&module=display&section=blog&blogid=31 where I discuss some of the issues with leather tools. The thing with the large cams is just one of the many "slips" in quality that we saw from Tandy as shown in this comparison of the older and newer 455 cams. Being as the 455 was used to form a seed pod in many patterns, the later C455 just looked crappy as the seed pod was too small and the ray pattern didn't match the flower. Here is another example of the differance in the convergance of the ray lines of two cams,

All of them are very good work, but the last one is the most attractive to my eyes.

1. Much more open background than is usually seen in Sheridan work. 2. Need to tie big flower in better. Lack of cotinuity in flow there. 3. Need more uniformity in size of leafs. Goes from coarse to fine, and then back to coarse.

Great find. Things built with mortise/tenon joints were built to last. If they are not as tight as you would like; you could drill a few small holes in the tenons which you would fill with linseed oil which would be absorbed by the wood causing it to swell and tighten up the joints. You might have to fill the holes several times.

If you are stuck using the tandy knife for while, pull the yoke off and put a dab of vaseline on the shaft and snap yoke back on

Some recent discussion on here got me to wondering: Have any of the many leathercraft manuals, books, videos, etc that we all enjoy in the englsh language been translated into other languages for use by non-english speaking/reading users? I did some searching on the net, and did see that there seem to be several leatherwork guides in Japanese, but they are works of Japanese origin, and not translations of English works. Any english translations of them? Does anybody know if Tandy/LF has made any moves in this direction? Seems like a potential market for those that hold the copyrights to the many books availible in english. I even wondered if anyone has had much success in using translation programs with leathercraft manuals. Considering some of the manuals that I have read which were originally in other languages, and then translated to confusing, and sometimes gibberish english, I am somewhat dubious of how well translation programs would work with our subject matter. INPUT ? ? ?

Bravo for you. You learn from experimenting on other than finished projects. You have learned that much of leatherwork is unforgiving, and it much better to learn on practice pieces instead of a project that you have invested much time in, only to ruin with a failed attempt at a new technique. Of course, even then you are not safe. Many a leather item has been ruined by experianced leatherworkers who simply got careless with something they had done many times successfully. LOL

I see there are several replies to your 1st issue, and little on your 2nd. You are aware that many leather items are assembled with some kind of glue prior to lacing or stitching, aren't you? For a beginner leather stitcher, I highly recommend that you get a copy of Al Stohlmans: The Art of Hand Sewing Leather. It is worth far more than it's cover price. I also recommend that you get his book on Tools. Books on leather working will teach you far more, faster, and more clearly, than asking questions on this forum. If you have the information in the book and still are having problems, then it is certainly time to come here and ask away.

I don't know why they don't understand the problem. It seems to be a very common occurance. I think it has something to do with settling due to gravity. I've noticed as my height shrinks by about a quarter of an inch, the missing height seems to resettle in an increased waist circumferance of around 2-3 inches. I haven't figure out yet why the loss to gain isn't proportional. It seems the lost height is mostly lost in the legs as my inseam size seems to be the measurement where the lost length is most noticeable..

I believe if you zoom on the photo, you will change your mind when you cann see the scuffs and scratches that would show much on the sueded texture of split leather.

Bravo! Too many times I read comments from people on here bitchin' about some tool. It is nice to see that some people understand that most tools need to be tuned up to work at their best!

Not too shabby for a first effort. The reason that your holes didn't line up is because the tooling leather changes size due to the wetting and drying out of the leather. Rubber cement your tooling leather to a some plastic film or a water resistant cardboard to minimize the problem. There are several threads on here about the procedure.