Matt S

I've had an offer accepted on a used SAS/Fortuna band-knife splitting machine subject to viewing. It's not in the best of shapes, with a little surface rust in places. The seller is an industrial machinery salvage/resale house and they don't know much about leather machines. I'll be viewing it in a couple weeks, and am under no obligation to pay unless I'm happy. Not entirely sure what model it is, maybe a UA, looks around 12" capacity. The only identifiable number is 4713, which could be a model or serial number. I'm ignorant on band-knife splitters except for using one several times. What should I be looking for? Specifically I'm thinking of high-mortality parts. I fully expect to have to buy a new knife and covert it from 3-phase or purchase a phase converter but for the price there's a lot of room in the budget. The main purpose will be splitting 2mm waxed chrome to 1-1.2mm for small leather goods, though I would like to use it for a wider range of work. Not going to be a huge volume of work -- in the tens of SQFT per month rather than hundreds. I'm also looking for a manual. Campbell-Randall has one for the UA/LA machines for $30 but I'm not sure if that's the correct model. Can anyone shed some light on models?

I would add a metal or wooden stiffening rib between the snaps and the edge of the flap.

@Jerr, put simply there is no stitching machine "not designed for leather" that can honestly do the sorts of thing you want to make. Of those two options from the Tandy catalogue the Boss is the better choice but at a similar price there are better options out there IMHO.

I find that a reduction of dwell time can be very effective in reducing the heat-affected zone around the debossed area. Reducing temperature can help too, so long as you still get the desired depth and colour of stamping. However in my case (with the leathers I use) the ring is normally a colour change rather than a buildup of waxes on the surface, even in heavily waxed leather. TBH though I generally don't mind a little colour change around the stamping -- it adds to the aesthetic. I've found that the crispest and most repeatable debossing is on leather with a heavy surface finish, which is how many upholstery leathers are treated. This would probably explain why you've been happier with the results of your stamping on that sort of leather.

When I first started in hobby leatherworking I bought a cheap set of 12 hole punches from a hardware store. They were absolute dog toffee -- blunt and wouldn't hold an edge even when I did sharpen them. Since then I've accumulated a drawerful of various punches piecemeal -- various brands, sizes and shapes. Most of them from bulk purchases of old tools. What I've learned is that I use far fewer different sizes than I thought I would -- probably two round punches regularly, which fit most different rivets I use. FWIW one's a Priory and the other a Maun. My suggestion would be to buy a good quality punch in each size you currently use. The performance difference over cheap-and-nasty is far greater than the price difference. Start using a new size of rivet or eyelet, buy a new punch.

Griff, what total thickness of leather are you sewing (minimum and maximum), what thickness of thread would you like to use, and how much are you willing to spend? With the information you've given us so far you've asked the equivalent of "which car should I buy, my passengers weigh 150lb". The problem that people who transition from hand sewing to machine sewing heavy threads encounter the most is that a machine performs a different stitch so has a far narrower range of thread/material combinations that it can work with. I would, for instance, be able to sew two pieces of thin leather together with a very heavy thread (18/6 linen for instance, just under 1mm thickness). However I know of no machine that could sew the same leather with that thread because it needs to conceal the lockstotxh knot inside the work.

Hi Treesner, This is the sort of thing I have: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/WT-90AS-Small-Manual-Hot-Foil-Stamping-Guide-Bronzing-Machine-for-PVC-Skin-and-Paper-Card/32870844778.html?spm=2114.search0104.3.74.262a59b7lZE8kO&ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_5_10065_10068_10130_10547_319_317_10548_10696_10192_10190_453_10084_454_10083_10618_10307_10820_10301_10821_538_10303_537_536_10059_10884_10887_100031_321_322_10103,searchweb201603_51,ppcSwitch_0&algo_expid=285e95e0-bbdc-40e7-b8fb-6efdf09e863a-10&algo_pvid=285e95e0-bbdc-40e7-b8fb-6efdf09e863a Basically an aluminium block with heater cartridges and a thermocouple in it. Powered off the mains through a basic thermostat, all mounted on what's basically a cheap arbor press. There's usually a hole though the block through which you screw your embossing plate. Alternatively you can just stick it on with high-temp adhesive if you're not going to change it very often. They're also available without the press (just a handle), but I think that the amount of physical pressure needed to stamp leather is too much to provide consistently this way. I have a second, similar one that's fitted for movable type. No particular brands to recommend. I just bought the cheapest one I could find on Aliexpress which appeared to meet my requirements. Both I have are adequate, and got my toe in the water without spending 4x the amount on a UK-made one of similar specs.

Glad you have those parts, you got a great deal. Hopefully it won't take you long to get it in top condition. Seikos are good machines. Apologies, I thought that your Pfaff didn't have reverse.

I'd be happy with that machine at double the price you paid. It's still a fraction of what a machine of this quality would cost new, so I always figure on spending some time and money in cleaning up any machine I buy second hand. Specifically I suggest oiling it heavily and leaving over night. Then fit a brand new top quality needle (correct class and size of course) and bobbin before retiming. Find the parts book online and write down all the ones that could do with replacement. Buy the ones you definitely need and wait to buy the "would be nice" ones until the machine has made some money. (The end cover isn't essential, but the bobbin cover nearly is.) Clean whatever schmoo you can without removing parts. Polish away any burrs or nicks on the shuttle hook that you can. As you've said there's not much this machine can do that your Pfaff cannot (except reverse). However you might find it useful to have your two machines setup to do different sorts of work -- the Seiko for v69/tkt40 thread and the Pfaff for v138/tkt20 for instance. That would mean less time adjusting the machine between different operations. Plus you'll have a backup in case of a sudden failure of your other machine.

Strictly speaking vinegaroon is a striker, rather than dye. By dissolving iron/steel in vinegar (acetic acid) you make ferric acetate, which reacts with the tannic acid in veg-tanned leather to precipitate ferric tannate in the leather. This is a blue-grey-black insoluble lake which is excellent as it doesn't wash out. Same principle has been used to darken oak for a very long time. If you don't want to mess about with witches' brews ferric acetate is available from chemical supply places but I found that ferric sulfate does much the same job and the powder is readily available in bulk from garden centres. Apparently the tablets that are taken for anaemia are the same stuff too, so if you wanted to try a small amount of it you could crush up a slack handful of them. Will Ghormley (who makes historically accurate Western leather) uses a big barrel of rusty water to produce a similar but slightly less intense colouring. I did some research a few years ago on different strikers. Intention was to be able to colour russet leather without the mess of dyes (I'm a clumsy sort and at that time was leathering from a carpeted bedroom). There's not a great deal of literature available to people who aren't tanning industry specialists and what I found is that strikers are, generally speaking, rather lacklustre on their own and best used as the tanneries do -- in conjunction with the more usual dyestuffs, which defeats the purposes for which I was researching them. Iron (from whatever source) gives the best effect on its own of all the strikers I tried. In the end I started buying prefinished leather, which is far more time-effective and will always have a better finish than I can achieve. However I have used it to edge-colour bridle leather that wasn't struck through. What I liked was that I could start burnishing straight away, without waiting for the dye to dry.

What you need is a consistent temperature, which is hard to achieve without some method of measuring the temperature. On a shiny metal surface that's pretty difficult to do. I use two different heated presses for this sort of thing, which have thermocouples built into the heater blocks and thermostats which control the temperature to an acceptable margin of error (one I had re calibrate with a sharpie). Before I bought these presses I used to use a heat gun to heat my stamp until my IR thermometer told me it was at the temperature that experiment had told me was what I needed, when I'd drop the tools, place the stamp on the leather, then emboss with my hydraulic press. This worked but was slow, fiddly, not very repeatable and was inconsistent with the impression it gave. The most basic Chinese heat embossers are like £120 if you don't mind waiting a couple weeks for it to arrive. If you can make do without the press you can get the heater block mounted on a handle for less money, but I wouldn't recommend it.

The whois lookup appears that the domain is registered to a Canadian company that sells domains. However the Black Mountains are indeed in south Wales. There is very little context info on this page or their Fakebook page so who knows? I'm leaning towards a genuine Welsh leatherworker who wants to offset the cost of their hobby by doing a little reselling. As to the tools they look like the higher end of Chinese tools. Not knocking on their quality per se but I'd like to at least know the origin of a tool for which I'd hypothetically forking out 80 of my hard-earned pounds.

Sounded like he needed to strop his edger to me ;-)

I exchanged emails with Tony Luberto a couple years ago about the Cub. He worked for various SM manufacturers for years and admired the stitch quality of the BUSM/Pearson No.6 harness machine. He produced a few machines over the years replicating the desirable characteristics of that classic machine but with modern parts (Ferdinand No.9 and Luberto Classic). The Cub is/was intended as a very stripped-down machine to reduce costs and make it portable. The market for such a machine (a hand-cranked heavy stitcher with small throat size and no reverse) is limited, well catered for by the Tippmann Boss and now the Cowboy Outlaw, at a similar price to the Cub which never had a great deal of marketing or distribution behind it. I really think that by fitting it with a crank handle instead of a flywheel and cheap servo motor Tony missed a trick -- it could still be hand-cranked for the masochists out there but motorised it would fill a different niche that's still somewhat open -- people who want a heavy-duty stitcher that's capable of going at a decent speed but is truly portable. It would also fill the niche for those people who need such a machine every now and then but can't dedicate the space to a proper machine stand, in which case it can be kept in a cupboard or on a shelf until it's needed, when it's chucked on the bench, used, then put away again. Add a reverse function and I'd be selling my left kidney for one. As it is I don't have $1400 to risk on being able to retrofit it with a flywheel.

I use a 6 ton hydraulic bearing press as my clicker. It's not as fast as a "real" one, nor is it a C-frame. However for £60 delivered I can't complain -- and it's still a damn sight faster than cutting by hand. I've been talking with a welder friend about building a C-frame with a swing-away top arm that holds the hydraulic jack. He's a bit leery about the forces involved. I'll probably just pony up for one of the Weaver/Lucris/Noya/Cowboy type swing-arm clickers. A single stroke (rather than 3-4 plus release) would be handy. I've got about a dozen cutting dies, which I designed myself with a vector-drawing package. Mainly from one supplier, but recently emailed the top dozen Google UK results for a quote for two simple dies that I needed quickly. Quotes varied from £60 to over £400. Now admittedly I think the top quote was for a forged feed-through die and the lowest a standard strip knife but that's fine for the relatively small volume I produce. Shop around, find an inexpensive supplier and $1000 would buy you a lot of dies if you're not looking for something too complicated. Even with business pricing it's £1100. That's most of the way towards buying a Lucris.

I'm looking at getting a small swing-arm clicker like this in the New Year. The Lucris clicker, a very similar design manufactured in Australia, is available from Alpress in Scotland. Last time I enquired it was £1300 plus shipping at 20% VAT. Sieck sells a (probably Chinese-made) machine for €1100 plus shipping and VAT: http://www.sieck.de/en/machines/cutting-pressing/swing-arm-cutting-machines/?produkt=4652 There's also a similar design available from Cowboy at a similar price. Noya also make one but they've never responded to my enquiries. There's a "lightly used" one on eBay UK but they want £1400, which I consider a little steep.

I fairly exclusively use pre-dyed leather these days but tend to use Aussie on every smooth piece of leather that goes out the door, even bridle. Slather it on and hit it with a heat gun just until it's liquid. Follow the hot air with a rag buff to take off any excess, then when it's cooled a final buff with a rag or horsehair brush.

@SilverForgeStudio Which do you want to make -- a splitter or a skiver -- and what do you wan to do with it? Lap skivers are great at making tapered skives in firmish leathers and can be used as splitters to a limited extent but they tend to lack repeatability and consistency. Fine if you want to split down some lacing (if you nurse it through) or the odd wallet back (if you have the muscle and accept the casualty rate). There's a few DIY designs, especially if you only want to split lace, but my favourite is a design welded by a saddler that takes utility knife blades. When I bought it I immediately sold my Cowboy lap-skiver and haven't looked back. Crank splitters are far better than lap skivers for splitting but only tend to work with stiffer and thicker leathers and can't be used for tapers. I often use mine for splitting 4mm bridle down to 1mm for wallets. I've seen one DIY crank splitter on this forum, based on a jeweller's rolling mill. Capacity was about 2" I think. Bell-knife skivers are really flexible machines -- straight tapered, curved tapered, or flat stepped skives up to 55mm wide, which means it can split up to about 2" wide (or 2" strips across a wider piece of leather). Best used for softer leathers, though dual-feed machines can apparently be used with greater success on harder leathers. I've skived 4mm bridle with mine with promising results but not good enough to rely on yet. I'll try again once I get hold of a toothed steel feed wheel. However I primarily use mine on medium-soft chrome tanned leathers, which is where it really shines. Not a practical DIY option I think, especially when you can pick up a new Chinese one with table and motor for under a grand. Band-knife splitters are fantastically controllable and repeatable machines to use -- typically they can split any leather up to 4mm thick to any thickness you like (even under 1mm) with a single pass and the waste "split" often being usable. However a DIY one would be very complex to build and the factory ones are apparently finicky to maintain. (Not a problem I have, I pay to use somebody else's!) Some sophisticated machines can taper different sections under computer control. (As a minor aside I would love a bench-top band-knife splitter -- 4" or 6" capacity would be just fine. I've toyed with the idea of DIYing one but keep seeing visions of band-knifing my fingers off.)

Many of the old machines (before electric power was commonly laid on in small premises) were built with/for treadle stands. Many of these treadles were discarded after motors were added at a later date. Plus it's easy to forget that 100 years ago, just as today, industrial sewing machines were designed and built primarily for use in factories rather than at home or in small workshops. Many sewing machines of this era were offered with clutches to be powered from a common line shaft, which was turned by a prime mover -- a steam engine, water wheel or a single large electric motor, which was common practice well into the last century. Try sewing a while with only one hand to guide the work and you'll realise why very few industrial machines were intended to be powered by hand -- even with a front wheel the ergonomics are far from ideal. Only about half of the 29K subclasses were made with front-wheels -- the extra gearing added cost and probably friction -- but there were others. There were various Pearson/BUSM machines (most famously the No.6) and patchers like the Bradbury A1 with front wheels. In these cases the front-facing wheel was more than a convenience or a flywheel mass -- the rear face of the wheel had several cam tracks machined into it, which directly drove several parts. This was the source of the machine's timing, rather than the top shaft as is more common these days. The only modern machines I can think of with front wheels are derivatives of old designs (various Chinese patchers and Luberto No.9). There is also, to my mind, a safety/liability issue -- front-mounted wheels are a bit more of a fingerbiter than side-mounted and are harder to put guards around, which are required in the workplace in many countries. That sounds promising -- I've been thinking about a Luberto Cub for a while but would want to modify it to some sort of battery-powered motor rather than going further down the hand-crank route.

Hi David, Reverse can be a bit of an awkward bugger in leather. Tensions and stitch length are often not quite matching as when you sew forwards. You either minimise the differences so they're acceptable, hide them, or use an alternate method. I have found that when you press the reverse makes a big difference. Best results occur when I "change gear" with the machine stopped, otherwise there will be skipped stitches, birdsnests and it won't stitch into the same holes. Different machines produce best results for me when I change from reverse to forward (or vice versa). Most machines seem to work best when I do this at bottom dead centre ( the needle at it's very lowest point), but some just a little past that (as the needle starts to rise).

Nm300, though you might get away with 280. The test that Singermania suggests is a good one.

I wonder what would be the minimum order quantity? I'd love some new 300s or 330s. There were several different arrangements for waxing thread available on the no6 machine, which are fairly well described in the catalogues. Over here it's rare to find any but the unheated solution box, which I think was the cheapest option. That's what I have on mine. I've used wax solution I made by dissolving candles in white spirit (paint thinner) with dry linen thread. Wax/linseed mix wasn't very successful. I've heard using straight linseed oil but I've not tried it yet. Most recently I've been using bonded poly thread with normal SM oil in the solution box. The manual mentions using prewaxed thread but I think it needed the needle block and shuttle box heated (by lamps or electric heaters) to soften the wax. One day I might fabricobble some approximation of the original using high-power aluminium cased resistors but that presupposes I'll find myself such a thing as spare time one day...

It's made by boiling up bits of bone, hoof, scraps of rawhide etc. to extract the collagen. Craftspeople usually buy the dried extract and rehydrate it in warm water. It's traditionally used for sealing leather edges over here as well as its more common uses in luthiery, cabinetmaking, veneering etc.

I managed to get hold of a pack of Schmetz 160s a couple years ago. Even with a no.4 needle steady I got a lot of breakages, which was painful at about £2/needle. There was a 3-1/2 size needle, which is pretty much a 180 -- I have some old IVIs which came with the machine. AFAIK there's no current production for the 331 needle class -- we're still using up the last batch of however many millions Schmetz was convinced to make. The manual suggests using a size 3 needle (nm160) with 18/3 linen for sewing around winkers/blinkers @ 10SPI. Is that a common size thread for that sort of job, or was this one of those weird late Victorian show/dress/fancy harness things?

The manual declares that the no6 can use up to 18/8 linen so the size isn't the issue, but finding needles will be. IVI (who made needles and castings for BUSM) would call them a size 7 needle. In modern terms you'll be looking for something like nm300 size, which do exist but not common in that class. I think that Schmetz was the most recent manufacturer of the 331 class needles and the only readily available ones are nm250, which is for 5cord linen. Aaron Martin in Canada lists nm250 and nm280 needles. If you can't find any suitable ones stateside PM me and I'll see what I can provide.