amuckart

That really is an incredibly good find for EU100, especially with that waxing apparatus! Do you have any photos of the back side of the machine?

Inkscape is the Right Tool for design work like this. It's free, multi-platform, saves its output in an open standard format (that you'll still be able to open in 10 years), and works. It has a bit of a learning curve, but the help is pretty good and there are books on it. For symmetrical stuff, explore the clone tool.

For wallets and shoes, I'd get a roller-foot post-bed machine. You can't do shoes on a cylinder bed machine.

I've never used one, but it looks to be similar to the STH-8, which I have but is a vertical-axis hook machine that takes a smaller bobbin. I take it you're looking at the one on TradeMe? I got my STH-8BL for NZ$350 in pretty good mechanical nick, but set up for upholstery. I got it to do tent repairs, for leather it'll need a servo motor and a different needle plate. Wiz has a similar machine set up with no feed dog and a slotted needle plate for leather. There's a $1 reserve Pfaff on there at the moment, currently at $30 that'll probably end up going cheap but it needs some work by the looks of things. I plan on getting a set of feet and a roller guide for it and getting a slotted needle plate laser cut. The thing that might get you about the STW-8 is that it's max stitch length is 5.5mm and it takes small bobbins. For leather, I'd hold out for the STH-8 or a Consew 206. There seems to have been a fairly steady flow of this class of machine on TM for the last little while. I see one guy with a couple of new in-the-box STH-8BLD3 machines for NZ$1400.

That looks knife cut to me. If you look really closely at the left side of the slot it looks like the cut goes a little too far. The key I've found cutting slots like that is to always cut away from the body of the leather, so for a given rectangle there will be eight cuts. I do it with a very sharp and sharply pointed Olfa AK-1 craft knife using a KB4-S/B blade going in almost vertically at the corners. I use the Olfa knife because the blades are a good contour and much higher quality than most x-acto / craft knife blades, and I got given them

Hi Charlie, If your trumpet is worth that much, I think you'd be getting the bad end of the deal trading it for a 31-15. They can be had for far far less than that.

Rees also has things to say on the topic: http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~marc-carlson/histshoe/Rees/rees3.htm

Hi Art, Thanks for the later references, I tend to focus so much on pre-1600 stuff that's what I default to when I hear "historical reenactment". NZ doesn't have a big CW reenactment scene Do you have a copy, and if so can you quote it here? Thanks.

I second that recommendation. That's where I got started. I've been reading and participating in it for a few years now and it's still the best compendium of information out there. Do you have references for white code, or ingredients pre-18th Century? I've looked into this quite a bit, as have people like Marc Carlson, and to my knowledge there is just no surviving evidence for the content of medieval shoemaking waxes. If you know of some I'd be really interested in seeing it, especially if you can document the use of asphaltum in them! I'm familiar with the CW-era and 18th century recipes, including the ones for masheen/white wax, but extrapolating backwards to medieval/renaissance techniques from the 18th century doesn't work. I don't get the link between Sellari's wax and the content of medieval code, am I missing something? The trick with adding things like tallow is to add them in tiny quantities. I take single shavings off of a cake of tallow and add one, pour, pull, set and test then re-melt if required. With reference to the recipes of Al's you quote, be aware that Rausch Naval Yards burned down and you can't get pitch from there any more. Colonial Williamsburg ended up importing some from China at vast cost since you apparently can't even get it from Sweden any more, which is a pretty sad state of affairs.

The first thing that popped into my mind was 'what's the trumpet worth if you sold it'? If you're willing to part with it to get a sewing machine then that pretty much sets your budget. It's easy to underestimate how much machine consumables can cost too, so keep that in mind.

How legit is it? It isn't. People do it, for a variety of reasons, but -- and I say this with the greatest of affection for the Society -- people do, and wear, an awful lot of dumb un-documentable crap in the SCA I've never seen any documentary or pictorial evidence that anyone in the middle ages who was of a position to wear a crown wore anything other than the biggest, most gem-studded hunk of precious metal they could get their hands on, let alone a strip of leather, so Jarl Sigmund is probably the closest you'll ever get to a 'historical' figure wearing one. Assuming you haven't made it already and are trying to document after the fact, and need something to enter, why not hand sew a coif or something? I've never been to the East, but if I were judging an A&S competition I'd give a basic hand-sewn coif with good documentation a lot more points than a beautifully made but impossible to document leather 'coronet'. Just my 2c from over in Lochac. William de Wyke Per pale sable and argent a bend cotised counterchanged

Looks like it's missing all the walking foot bits off the back.

Save your money and buy a Consew 206 or a Seiko STH-8BL. If you've got space for a Landis 1, surely you can fit a proper industrial machine in?

Hi Brendan, No, I don't have any pre 18th century sources for the making of code at all. The Lystine Lordys Verament, as quoted on my site, tells us they had it in medieval times, but nothing about what it was made of or how. As far as I am aware, no such detail from any extant source has come to light. It's probable that it was pitch-based and unlikely that it contained beeswax. I'm working up a mix using pitch, rosin, and a tiny amount of tallow but it's pretty variable so down to experimentation with the materials you have on hand. Pitch is the key though, proper black pitch, not the rosin places like Jas Townsend sell as 'pitch'. Are you on the medieval shoemaking yahoo group? If you make medieval shoes, I'd suggest joining. There's a chap on there who bought a bulk load of bristles and is on selling them in manageable quantities. PM me your email address if you're not on the yahoo group and I'll send it on to him.

Best topic title ever! Nice machine too

I believe that was originally designed as an outsoler for shoes. They're neat machines. I want one for my ancient hand-cranked outsoler collection.

That's the consistent story I'm hearing. There's one, maybe two Chinese factories producing machines that're good to go out of the box, a bunch producing stuff that's basically sound in terms of material, parts and design, but with nothing in the way of assembly QA, and a whole lot churning out utter junk. The good ones are good to go out of the box with perhaps very minor tuning, the junk is going to be junk no matter what but the stuff in the middle that's basically sound but often badly assembled can be made good by people willing to go through the assembly QA. That's where people like Cowboy Bob and Cobra Steve come in. The thing is that you can buy the same machine's they're selling through someone else and get something that's unusable, because it's the work they put in that makes the machines good, and I think there's enough evidence from people using them to show that they are good, but only if you get them from the right person. I don't think that necessarily holds true, I think there's a class of machine made to good designs out of good materials (after all, the materials aren't exactly the difficult bit, 19th century iron and steel did just fine thanks) just badly assembled and spottily QAed at the factory. For those ones I think there's a very good chance they'll last the distance, after all they're faithful copies of good designs. They might never be as good as the Singers and Adlers were, but hell, Singer basically doesn't exist any more, and even Adlers aren't as good as Adlers used to be. I've got a handful of 'Big Old Singers' and they're beautiful pieces of work, but they're getting on for 100 years old, and it shows.

Very nice! Where'd you get the dice from?

Me, I'd rather leave the @#!@#!$%#@$ thing at home!

http://bootmaker.com/45Kmanual.pdf

Sorry the file links on my site are 404'ing at the moment. I'm having a fight with wordpress to make 'em work. Try college sewing for the bell crank parts.

If you do a google search for "compass race" does that show up what you're after?

If money was truly no object, I'd go to Campbell-Randall and get them to engineer me a Campbell high-lift with a 16" throat.

Thanks Gregg, you're right about my original question, and my circumstance. I've got some second hand industrials, Singers, a Seiko flatbed, a Pfaff 35-4, a #6 Pearson, a Pedersen outsoler, and I've got access to good motors at a price I'm willing to pay (refurbed Quick Rotan), and okay motors at half that. I can weld, so if it really comes down to it I can build a pedestal stand. What I don't have in New Zealand is a second-hand market for 441 or 205 type machines. What's left of the NZ saddlery industry seems to run on Pearson #6s and ancient Adler 205s, and you pretty much have to wait for someone to die before you can get your hands one one of those. NZ being a small place with a culture of keeping machines running way way after they should have died and never throwing anything away means that the second-hand machines that make it onto our local ebay equivalent are often quite worn out. This means I'm after something new, but lacking the budget to get a new Juki or Seiko (for that money I'll buy a rebuilt Campbell from Dan) I'm looking at Chinese clones. I know someone who bought a machine from a brand that's popular on this board that not only didn't sew out of the box, it needed a near complete rebuild to work almost acceptably. Fortunately they had access to a friendly local machinist or they'd have been left with a multi-thousand dollar boat anchor. What that taught me is that it's the person you buy the machine from, not the brand on it that's important. I don't mind taking a punt on a second-hand machine that hasn't cost me a lot and might or might not sew without a whole lot of work and spare parts, but if I'm going to buy a new machine it has to Just Work. Now, I could get Steve or Bob to ship me a machine from the USA, but the shipping and customs charges add enough to make that proposition unappealing compared to, say, buying a Highlead which are considered expensive but come with a good out-of-the-box reputation and head-only are actually cheaper than, say, a Cobra class 4 head from Steve by the time it's been shipped here from the US. Unless I luck into a good used 441 clone I'll probably end up going the Highlead route, just for cost efficiency. Cheers.