Matt S

I have two Filson cruiser jackets, a single mackinaw and a tin cloth. The mack is just as good as when I bought it nearly 10 years ago. The tin cruiser is certainly showing its age but what it's put up with would ruin about a dozen "working" jackets and still keeps the rain off me and the stuff in my pockets in my pockets. When I bought them Filson wasn't available in the UK and I had to import. I had no problem paying the price, the shipping or the import taxes. Quality saves money in the long run. Today Filson is a lifestyle brand, with most of the garments made outside of the US. Unfortunately this foreign construction hasn't reduced retail prices, which have kept creeping up. Filson cooperates with designers from other firms for "limited edition" runs. It's a far cry from the 100-odd 100-year-old patterns they used to keep making, year in year out, for a fair price. Lumbersexuals rather than lumberjacks. Carharrt is now headed down this route.

The army goes back and forth on this every decade or so. Until recently there was a minimi light MG in every section, one Sharpshooter (7.62) rifle and the rest with rifles (5.56). GPMG (7.62) available at platoon level when required. However this year the minimi has been withdrawn -- current thinking (feedback from Afghan) is that a a moderate quantity of aimed semi-automatic fire is more effective than hundreds of rounds in the enemy's general direction. The problem specifically with the minimi was that the MoD bought them in a hurry and in their infinite wisdom bought the short barreled version which is effective to maybe 300 yards... For a war in mountainous territory where a goatherd with a Lee Enfield or Mosin Nagant can harass a chokepoint at 1200 yards. Sure makes a lot of noise though. The L86 (longer SA80, used to be one in every fireteam for suppressive bursts) was withdrawn about 10 years ago as being worthless. It's being reworked with a heavier barrel and decent optics as a marksman's rifle, splitting the difference between the Individual Weapon and the Sharpshooter rifle. As to the .303 No4, they still work. Certainly mine does even at 74 years old ;-)

Chris have you tried one of the "man with van" sites? Never give ahead with any of them but I've not had a problem getting quotes on moving machines over 100kg. Out of curiosity which couriers are refusing to handle anything over 32kg?

Sharkey, we have a dedicated, section for discussions of such things, in order to keep the rest of the forum family and work friendly. I'll send you a PM how to gain access.

Great work on the 45D, @Constabulary That's a useful looking stand. I'm looking at building something similar out of Dexion, since I don't have a welding machine at the moment. It's 40x40x2mm mild steel angle commonly used for industrial racking, which I'll brace well and bolt to a 30mm ply base and top. Do you think such a thing would be beefy enough for a Seiko LCW-8?

Here's some photos for your collective enjoyments. Notice the clutch plate, completely unguarded for convenience/maiming. Those two square bits the motor's hanging off? 30mm square steel bar. Solid, not tube. Running half the depth of the table. Let's just say nobody's going to pick this thing up and run away with it. Just in case anyone else is insane/cheap enough to still be running a similar motor I found that the lever assembly had to be removed from the bottom of the motor to allow enough access to remove the pulley wheel. Here's the innards of the pulley motor, after I flipped the friction ring and reseated it with judicious use of the thumb detector. Tiny bits of cork got shaved off but c'est la vie. Should be good for a few more centuries now.

I stripped the motor last night and pulled the pulley wheel. I found that the clutch on Methuselah's motor has a friction ring made of cork pressed into a deep groove. It was pretty glazed and dry. Worrying about being able to get an off-the-shelf replacement I thought I'd try turning it over and using the other side. TLDR it worked, though I lost a tiny bit of material tapping it home. After taking the opportunity to replace the mastodon grease in the sleeve bearings everything went together just fine, with no spare parts left over. No squeaking this time and the pedal is far more responsive, which is great. We'll have to wait a few months for the damp weather to see if the stuck pig impression returns though.

Binder clips like you might use in an office to keep papers together. You can buy them by the jarful pretty cheap. If the jaws look like they're going to leave a mark on the leather I use a little scrap of leather to cushion the work. I've also used wooden clothes pegs (the type with the spring, not the one that's just a dowel with a slot cut down it) but I foudn they are very bulky for the amount of clamping force they give. Of course, contact cement (of various types, including water-based) usually eliminates the need for clamping.

That's getting real good Sam. Looks like the layers are distinct, neat and flat, which indicates to me that you're not pressing excessively hard when burnishing (which can squash and bend layers) and that you don't have any gaps or voids. When I use soap as part of the burnishing process I use a bar of glycerin soap -- Pears is a common brand over here -- as I find the paste stuff in a can easily overspills the edges a little. Not so much a problem on the predyed prefinished bridle I normally use but on tooling veg that can make a stain. Just rub the bar fairly vigorously down the edge once damped. Something that I don't see mentioned very often is to avoid the temptation to overburnish. Once it's hard and shiny I keep thinking "just rub a bit longer and it'll get shinier". However after a certain point the edge will be dry and actually get less shiny as I rub further. The important thing here is to recognise when the leather has got to its peak shininess, stop, let it dry (possibly overnight), then work on it again with whatever that particular leather needs. If I'm really going to town on a piece perhaps rub it with fine sandpaper, wet the edge and burnish again. If it's already pretty good I might put a sealer like resolene on the edge, or maybe just rub in some beeswax and buff off the excess.

My parents taught me that there are certain topics which shouldn't be discussed in polite company. Religion and politics are right at the top of that list. This is a forum for the discussion of leatherwork, not a soapbox for your views on this, that and the other. Just because you don't know how such an item can be crafted it doesn't mean it can't be done. I seriously doubt he spends a whole day painting or burnishing a wallet, unless he takes a 6 hours lunch break. If it takes you a whole day to burnish two foot of edge perhaps you should go read all the advice you've been given recently. Very experienced leatherworkers have shared their years of wisdom with you.

A true saddle stitch can only be achieved by hand, yes. This involves each thread completely passing through the leather to the other side, sometimes passing around the other thread in that hole (an overhand knot -- what people often call a 'cast' thread). Other hand-stitching techniques are possible, such as the back-stitch and the baseball stitch.

Blimey, I'll have to rent a truck I think...

@RusticLeatherShop for someone who only burnished his first edge this week you sure do speak with a lot of authority. I've done a fair bit of stitching by hand as well as machine and I can tell you for sure those wallets are saddle stitched. They're also stitched with a low-yarn twisted thread with minimal bonding/sizing, probably a 3-yarn polished linen, whereas the vast majority of machine sewing will be done with bonded nylon or polyester. Further, burnished edges like the blue leather are entirely possible without paint. Notice how it's slightly translucent? Looks like burnished dyed-though veg-tan to me. Compare with the orange of the notes divider, which is definitely folded before being stitched -- not bound but folded. Yes I expect that the maker did use glue, it's bloody useful and results in a better product when properly applied. If he thinks he can sell a $200-1000 wallet, good luck to him. People are willing to pay for craftsmanship and quality.

Please forgive me if this topic has been covered elsewhere but I couldn't find any other references to it. I know there's fewer clutch motors being operated these days but they're still useful. I am posting under the sewing machine section I have a clutch motor on my bell skiver, a 1/2HP 1400RPM Hoover. Looks like it dates to a time when Pontius was a pilot, with an exposed clutch. It's recently developed the "curious quirk" of screaming like I'm banging a sack of randy tomcats against a wall whenever the clutch warms up, which in practice means under a minute of use. Doesn't occur running the machine without load. Two polar opposite causes and fixes occur to me but I don't know enough about clutches to know which is appropriate: (1) The clutch pads are sticking and need a lubricant. (2) The clutch pads are glazed, so not gripping against each other and need deglazing, perhaps with a solvent, or the application of spray-on belt-grip. The obvious fix would probably be to replace the clutch pads but I think this motor went out of production about the same time as the Brown Bess. I could replace the motor but this handily hangs off the frame of the table rather than bolting through the wooden top, which is convenient. Do any fixes for the current motor spring to mind?

I use a bench grinder as the motor for burnishing, but I use a wooden burnishing wheel from Nigel Armitage. It's nothing particularly fancy but well made and well balanced for minimal vibration. Almost any hardwood will work for such a wheel, or as others have said stiff canvas or felt, leather, plastic... they key is that it's smooth, firm, well balanced for and not going to fracture. 3000 RPM is bloody fast -- for a 50mm wheel that's about 57KPH. Alex is right -- fracture a 125mm wheel like you're using and you'll be dodging bits of rock at 140KPH. Make a hell of a mess of you. Different leathers burnish better with different substances and techniques. I tend to use diluted water-based glues as burnishing agents as this gives a faster and longer-lasting result. PVA (white wood glue) is a good starting point. You can use just about any wax for an extra shine.

I've heard that those sealing rings used to be beeswax but certainly in the States they have now changed to a less expensive substance. I don't know if we even use them on this soggy island. You can use most waxes for this method but as I mention above the harder the wax you start with the harder the leather ends up. I made a moulded knife sheath for my girlfriend from some red bridle leather that was to soft to hold the knife securely so I soaked it in melted candles and it's hard like wood now. Maybe if paraffin wax is all you can get hold of you'll get something a bit more like beeswax by melting and mixing it with an oil of some sort? In the UK beekeeping is a moderately popular middle-class hobby and business, which has been repopularised by the public's understanding of the decline of the honeybee and what an ecological disaster this would be. There's beekeepers in every small town that are usually very happy to sell you a bit, and if not there is a box of wax in every hardware or home improvement store. There's plenty of eBay sellers who will give quantity discounts as well -- it's widely used in the cosmetics and cake-decorating trades.

Applying heated wax is one of the modern definitions of a process called cuir bouilli, which has used historically to harden leather, especially as armour. A bit like damascus steel there is a lot of debate, disagreement and myth as to how cuir bouilli was produced in antiquity but applying hot wax to a piece of leather causes two different mechanisms of hardening. As you say the wax soaks into leather, filling the voids between the fibres. Having done some simple experiments I have found that the harder the wax you use the harder the resulting treated leather becomes. E.g. beeswax results in a softer wax-soaked leather than paraffin wax. Further, once wax has been soaked into the leather it can be reshaped a little by the application of heat, which I presume is due to the wax softening. Secondly the heat transferred to the leather from the wax itself does something to harden the leather. I think it cross-links the leather (which is a natural polymer) further or something but I'm no chemist and leather has been flummoxing chemists for a few centuries now. Lovely rig, looks appropriate for a backwoods boy from that particular conflict. I'm guessing you shoot a percussion revolver?

Nice find, that old japanning is very tough and it's often there under decades of schmoo. I can't find much information online about the 119-2, looks like a class 17 but with a walking foot. Is that right?

I have zero experience with it or any other rein rounder but Weaver sells theirs through the Amazon global store. To the UK it's £190 including shipping and customs fees.

Your sewing machine is Chinese made. Genuine Juki TSC-441 costs several times what you paid. Chinese stuff can be excellent, or it can be rubbish. It is however generally much more affordable than Western-made equipment, which is good for a hobbyist like yourself. I've not heard of any attachment that can bind 7/8" thick leather and can't think of hardly any application for such a beast. Binders are apparently a bit of a "black art" -- part science, part experience, part voodoo. There's a surprising amount of factors that go into designing and manufacturing a seemingly simple item like a binder so a custom one is big bucks and the more specialist your application the more expensive it's going to be. As an example a good brand standard shell-binder costs more than $50. Binding attachments for 441 type machines aren't common or popular, I expect, because 441 machines are most commonly used by hobbyists and very small manufacturers who rarely do any binding. They are very flexible machines that can be adjusted to do a lot of different jobs but that's not how factories work. Production facilities of any appreciable size have a range of different machine types, each setup or modified to do one job, or a small range of jobs, very well and very fast.

You don't need a skiving machine, people have been skiving for centuries with just a knife. There's plenty of glues that work on leather that aren't specifically designed for it. Normal contact cement is popular, and even regular white PVA like you might use for wood works well on leather, so long as you apply pressure to the leather until the glue is dry. I used to hate the delay and so avoided glueing leather for a long time, but honestly it really held me back in the projects I could make. What leather are you trying to burnish? Generally it's only the vegetable tanned leathers that will burnish. Thin leathers are difficult to burnish by hand. I have had some success burnishing chrome tannages using a high-speed wheel.

There's a lot of good choices for sewing holsters but the types of machine you need are heavy duty and aren't very common, as industrial sewing machines go. The time taken to find a suitable second-hand machine, acquire it, then possibly fix or adjust it to do what your friend needs will be significant, especially if you're beginners at this. It will probably be better to buy a new machine that has been setup for sewing thick, heavy leather. As @dikman says Chinese clones of the Juki 441 are popular for this purpose, and are very flexible machines that can be adjusted to many tasks. What is your friend's budget and what sorts of holsters does he/does he want to make?

Looks like a Singer UFA, which was the predecessor the the 29K and has been repainted (neatly) at some point. It's a patcher machine, which sacrifices bobbin and thread capacity for the ability to sew in all directions in very tight areas. Primarily intended for repairing items, they don't really lend themselves to manufacturing though some people do use them for making stuff. If it's like more modern patchers it'll sew a maximum of 1/4" total leather thickness with maxium TKT40/V69 thread, which is OK for things like wallets and notebooks though a little on the thin side for my taste. Bobbin capacity is very small. Spare parts will be like rocking horse droppings. Cool machine for a collector but probably not what you friend needs. If you could let us know the area your friend lives and what they want to make we can provide more specific help.

These guides look great. I could really do with one for the zips I use (YKK brass No5 is think). @Uwe Do you know or suspect where the distortion is occuring -- is the body of each link warping? Or is it an excessive difference in the internal diameter of the pivot holes and the external diameter of the corresponding studs? If it's the latter perhaps you could replace the studs with holes and introduce some sort of pivot pin? Maybe even reaming the holes to dimension if they aren't parallel or out of round?

Tom, what do you need your splitter to do? There are, I think, two different Cowboy machine dealers in Oz.