amuckart

Ray, there's all kinds of things better than the Lansky system. It's good for small jobs and touchups where you don't need an outstandingly sharp edge, but it's not something I'd use for tools. The same things I linked to in my reply to your scissor sharpening post will do knives, tools, and all sorts. There's a lot to be said for powered sharpening systems, and contrary to what Tormek's marketing will tell you you don't need to spend thousands to get something really really good.

Two questions: What size/style of scissors, and what do you use to sharpen your existing edged tools? You can sharpen most types of scissors quite effectively by removing the pivot bolt and putting the blade in a vice (with non-marking jaws) then just follow the existing bevel angle with your preferred sharpening device. I use a variety of things from files for really blunt ones right through to ceramic sticks. You need to lap the back between grits too to remove the wire edge. If you lack an appropriate sharpening device, then a solid flat thing with wet-n-dry sandpaper either wrapped around it tightly or lightly contact-glued on works extremely well. You can do this with scissors that lack a removable pivot bolt, it's just less convenient. I've found that if a pair of scissors can't be taken apart then they often aren't worth sharpening. I usually look to the woodworking community for sharpening ideas since good edged tools are so critical to fine woodwork, and they have some of the weirdest shapes to deal with which means there's a lot of really good info and ideas to be found there. For some reason there seems to be a lot more scientific an approach to sharpening in the woodworking community than in the leatherworking community. Brent's Sharpening Pages is one of the best places on the 'net to look at for basic principles and info on abrasives. It's very focussed on plane blades, but his jig and techniques are adaptable to various edged tools other than plane blades. At risk of coming across as a Lee Valley fanboy, here's some links to things I think are useful. You can probably find them elsewhere too, but Lee Valley is a convenient one-stop-shop whose service and shipping I've always been very happy with. It's run by woodworkers, for woodworkers, so their kit is well designed for the job. You can use a 1" belt grinder to sharpen scissors and darn near anything else you might have too. It doesn't come with a motor, but the big advantage it has over cheap 'n' nasty belt grinders you'll find at big-box hardware stores is that it can run in reverse which means you can use it to strop/hone tools with the edge up, which in turn means you can use a tool rest and jigs to ensure a more accurate edge angle. One of these with a variable-speed reversible motor is awfully close to the perfect device for tool sharpening. They also make a nifty tool rest that'll fit that grinder, or bench grinders, and let you sharpen from 90" to extremely acute angles. Get yourself a decent selection of grinding belts while you're there and you'll be se up to sharpen almost anything for a good long time. I think the belt grinder is a better solution than a bench grinder because you can get access to a wider array of abrasives, and you can do slack-belt sharpening of appleseed edges, which you can't do on a bench grinder. If you buy one thing to help you with sharpening, make it Leonard Lee's The Complete Guide to Sharpening. It doesn't cover scissors explicitly but as he says, "sharpening is mostly common sense augmented by a few basic principles, some standard abrasives and a few cunning jigs", and it will certainly give you the background you need and ideas for how to sharpen all kinds of things. The Perfect Edge by Ron Hock appears to cover scissors explicitly, but I don't have a copy.

Hi Kevin, What do you mean by "all heads"? Cheers.

Yep, that's one of the things that is driving me to learn how to make my own. It's also why I wear NZ$500 dress shoes to work. People's eyes bug out of their heads when they hear that, but in 10 years I'll still be wearing those shoes and they'll have spent more than that on cheap Chinese crap, and y'know, when my English-made brogues are 10 years old they'll still look better than a brand new pair of $90, or even $200 Chinese-made shoes.

Thanks Wiz, I'll drop them a line. Do you know if the Campbell uses Whitworth or SAE machine screws?

Hi all, Along with my Pearson I've got a few machines with square-head screws all over, but I'm having a bear of a time finding T-wrenches to go with them. Can anyone point me to a source that doesn't involve selling a kidney to fund the purchase? Where I am I haven't even had any luck finding sockets for square head screws. The local auto parts store has 'universal' jobs, but they go in the same drawer as adjustable wrenches and only get used for things I don't care about afterwards. I'd rather have proper t-wrenches than sockets anyway, sockets are a PITA for quick minor adjustments. If anyone knows where I can get replacement square head machine screws I'd be real interested. I suspect the most likely place to find 'em these days is near the back end of the proverbial rocking horse. I've got access to BSW tap/die sets so it's conceivable I could get some made up and thread them myself. If I did that would getting the 'blanks' cast work, or do they need to be machined up? Thanks.

Thanks Art, I appreciate that. I have been down the Stockholm tar path, I just haven't written it up yet. I'm still looking for a workable black wax recipe that's doable with commonly available materials. It's difficult now that good genuine pine pitch is so rare, but I'm fairly close now.

Step by step with pictures: my shoemaking wax instructions

That speaks to pretty sub-standard construction. Good footwear should be repairable forever unless the actual uppers leather disintegrates. Cardboard is for notebooks, not footwear. If you want to get some decent motorcycle boots, have a look at wesco engineer boots from boot.com

That's nice work, but I can't pass this without checking: You do know that ring belts like that are basically a late 20th century invention, right?

Actually, now that you mention it that might have something to do with it. I have found Australian customs charges usurious in other situations.

That's a right cunning plan. Well done. If you want the best way to get a plane blade terrifyingly sharp, have a look at Brent's Sharpening Pages they're some of the best freely available sharpening information out there, and his techniques are applicable to pretty much anything you can build a jig for.

According to the Cruiserworks website the official place to send 'em now is www.resole.com Have you tried them?

You looked at Leffler, didn't you? I wouldn't buy anything from there unless it was something I absolutely couldn't get anywhere else. Their markups on things like tools are eye watering. I've had some great service from them in the past in the times I was able to get the old man on the phone, but I think he died a while back and the last time I called them up they didn't know what I was asking for or where it was.

Yep, they look repairable to me too. Where did you send them originally? "Thank you for your 12,000-plus views, comments and e-mails since we announced the purchase of CruiserWorks™ by Sharp Capital Group, LLC." Yeah, because "Sharp Capital Group, LLC" sounds like a really customer-focused business that cares about the quality of their products!

Do you have pictures of them in their current state?

How thick is the stock that's made from? Cheers.

Do you have any pictures of the machine? The top of the head end and pictures of the various stages of the stitch cycle would be handy.

Personally, I wouldn't pay EU525 for that machine, especially if I already had an SD.28, but the gear-head in me totally understands wanting it anyway! I think EU80 is a pretty fair price for a used SD.28 that hasn't been restored or rebuilt. If you watch the auctions for the EU600 SD.28s, are they actually selling at that price? The only way I'd pay that for one is if it came complete with all of the original parts, burner, bobbin winder, manual etc. It looks like the Rafflenbeul's are a lot more common in Germany (surprise, surprise!) than over here in New Zealand. For a machine I just happen to want for the collection and don't actually need It'll be a while before I can justify shipping one here though. If you can get bigger pictures, I'd really appreciate it, thanks.

What an interesting machine! Any chance you could email me bigger pictures of it? It's an obvious earlier version of the SD.28 and it's interesting to see what's been refined. I'm quite interested in Junker & Ruh machines from a historical persepective. What you should pay for it depends on what you want it for. If it's being offered as a collector piece, be prepared to fork out big, the 22s are less common than the 28s. If you want it as a using sewing machine, consider what it does compared to what you want to make, local availability of needles, how it fits into your workshop, how well it sews, etc and go from there. Their advantages are that they're small, and hand operated. Their disadvantages are a very short throat depth, needles that make quite a big hole for the thread size, and lack of availability of needles and parts. If you want it for outsoling shoes, there are better hand-cranked options, but none quite as small as the Junker & Ruh. I have a Frobana Gritzner outsoler that makes a better stitch than the Junker, and uses the same shuttle as the 45k. The needles for it make a huge hole though. I still want to get my hands on a Rafflenbeul MS200 - they're a hand-cranked needle & awl machine. IMO, used SD.28s go for far more than they're worth. They're good machines, but the reality is they're just not EU600 good, considering what else 600 Euros will buy you. When you consider that Henry Veenhoven sells refurbished ones for US$600 and that unless you luck into a really good second-hand one they can take a lot of work to get going well, they aren't rare enough as collector pieces to warrant that kind of price. I have two, I paid NZ$120 for one, and NZ$400 for the other and a 6" crank splitter. The only reason I bought the second one was for the harness plate. Both of them have been fiddly to get going properly and needles for them cost me as much as one of the machines.

From everything I've read on here, I have no doubt they will, but what I have discovered is the case with at least one of the popular vendors on here is that when you buy a machine from their guy in the USA you get a known-good well adjusted machine that's had a lot of work put into it to make it work the way their customers need it to, and you get legendary after-sales support. If you buy the same brand machine when you're in another country though, what you get is a machine shipped direct from their factory in China, with none of that value-add, none of the expectations of reliability that US buyers can rightly expect, and in the experience of at least one saddler I know, none of the aftermarket support when it doesn't work out of the box. That discovery is the reason I started this thread, to find out if the ex-factory quality is up to a standard to make buying a machine shipped straight from China a safe bet for brands other than Highlead which has a good out-of-the-box reputation than other Chinese brands, but is several hundred US$/head more expensive. I'll do that, thanks. I'm reasonably handy, I've completely stripped and reassembled machines before. I've got no problem with buying accessory sets from a US dealer and bolting them to a different brand machine if they'll fit (and this is an option I've explored). So long as it's fairly simple easy stuff that isn't going to add hundreds of dollars to the price of the machine. This one has got to Just Work, unlike my Pearson #6, which sits in the corner and gets worked on intermittently as and when I have time and enthusiasm (it'll be great when it's done though! Whenever that is ) Thanks Steve, I appreciate your reply here - and to my email inquiries also.

Just to stave off the inevitable torrent of responses from people telling me to buy an Artisan or Cobra or Cowboy: I get it, I've read this forum extensively, and I've seen all the arguments for buying from the dealers time and time again and I think they're perfectly valid but there's one important point to consider: I'm not "here in the US" I'm in New Zealand, 8,000 miles and 17 time zones away from the US. I'm not asking who I should buy from, I'm asking whether the situation frequently mentioned in the archives where vendors are overhauling machines before shipping them out is still happening, or whether they've worked with the QA folk at the factories to get them up to spec at that end of the process so that when I get a quote and it's for a machine drop-shipped direct from the factory in China, with different branding on it, am I in fact getting the same thing as someone in America buying from the vendor after they've overhauled and checked out the machine? The service that is so big a part of these dealer's value proposition is not accessible to people in my time zone the way it is to people maybe one or two hour's difference from the vendor, nor are parts so easily available. On top of that, shipping something of that size/weight and value is horrifically expensive, not to mention the customs charges and taxes that land on it (and the shipping costs) before customs will release it, so the pricing changes drastically. I'm still interested in the answer to my original question about the ex-factory quality of the machines various people are re-branding and selling, because that's something I need to be able to take into account.

Sadly, in this day and age, one of these things is common, and the other is not. Much as I wish it were different!

TwinOaks, 9pm on a Saturday here is 5am in Toledo and Toronto. This is the issue, by dint of the timezones alone I'm not going to be able to leverage the services of the vendors in the USA and Canada the same way people more locally can, and shipping something back to them to get worked on is right out, so the whole set of considerations is different than for someone in the USA or Canada.

Setup isn't a problem, I can take care of that easily. I'm talking about whether the machines need actual remedial engineering work these days before they're sent to end customers, or whether they're good straight from the factory. If the value proposition of buying a machine from one of the member vendors here is a re-engineered machine then it's something I'll think about, but If I order through them and get something drop-shipped direct from the factory in China, then it's a far less compelling proposition. I'm asking the questions here, in a public forum, so that the information goes into the archives and other people outside of the USA can get the information too.