Aggiebraider

Howdy Everyone, So I went to the Weaver's Sale a couple weeks ago and bought a few bleached rawhide backs and after soaking them I have been having some problems. I did screw up and I left the hides in the water barrel for too long and didnt take them out until about 24 hours later. I then let them dry for a good long while, and when there was still some moisture in them I cut them into 1/2" strands off a round and noticed there were some sections that are really squishy. I let them dry out for a few days like this and then today I went to stretch them between a couple posts, before which I rewet them for just about an hour, just so they wouldnt be too stiff to stretch on the post. The soft spots that I had noticed before soaked up so much water it was kind of ridiculous so I left them out in the sun for a bit and the normal sections dried out like I would expect, but the soft spots were still wet. So I nailed it up and tried to stretch it verrrryyyyy lightly, not pulling even hard enough to take the curls out and the strips broke at the soft spots about 10 times. Needless to say I was about to go nuts at this point. I just cant understand why some parts dry out normally and some are squishy and dont dry correctly. Because it isnt consistently like this I think the problem is in the hide, not user error, even though I had a brain fart and left it in the water so long. I know that I shouldnt expect quite so much from a hide that I got from Weavers, but this is the first set of hides that I have cut and so I wanted to make sure there was something I could do to prevent this or fix it. Thanks for any help or advice you can give me. CW

I really like the squared off bottoms really nice job. How do you get the twist to stay in the fringe?

Hey, I just made a bracelet with multiple buttons from that precut Tandy kangaroo lace crap, and from the looks of the picture, you used what they call natural and then whatever they call the dark brown for the interweaves on the buttons. From what I noticed, the natural doesnt take in the moisture as well as the brown does. I was able to get the brown lace to actually turn into something that feels like leather. Also, I was pretty liberal with the soap and made sure that there was plenty of water in my sponge so I could make lather, rather than just put the soap on by itself. May help with some of the stiffness. I would have to agree with Bevan in that I dont think your core diameter is the correct size for the width of the lace. It is entirely too late for me to go look up what you should use with 1/8" 8 strand round, but Bevan's calculation seems right. I think that some of the button issues that others are seeing may be fixed by using the correct core diameter. But with that said, I am in the same boat as you. I am still learning how to get the foundations just right so that the buttons cover, without gaps and without bunching up or not having enough foundation.....probably like everything else that has to do with leather - just practice practice practice because it takes a certain feel lol. Hope I could be at least somewhat of a help.

As far as performance goes, it really depends on which end the person is roping when using it. My brother ropes full time and he uses a tripping breast collar alot on his head horse, but doesnt always use both sets of tugs and it works fine. On his heeling horses though it would be overkill. So, you might just consider making two, one of each type to give to the winning team or high money winner from each end.

Hey Everyone, I am having serious trouble making a long PK with a gaucho interweave of another color. I started making a 6b 7p PK and then when I get to 11b, I cant finish it to 12. I will inevitably have two strands from the base knot that are next to each other and I cannot figure out how to split them. I know that I should just be able to continue the pattern, but for the life of me I cannot figure out the pattern to just do it in my head. I understand the PK pattern just fine to do a herringbone interweave, but the gaucho doesnt make sense to me. I am using Gail Hought's book and I think that it is missing a few steps at the end, and she is just using one color so I cant figure out how it should look with two colors. If anyone has a book with a good explanation on how to do this with two colors and could scan it for me I would really appreciate it. Thanks, CW

Hey Entiendo, Gail Hought's book on romal reins is very very good in that she gives examples of different buttton styles, different types of reins, and calculates the materials needed fairly accurately. If you were wanting to make a basic pair with buttons spaced apart it would take 400-450 ft of leather. A set of reins with full buttons (buttons all touching) would take over 500 ft of leather. I guess the number of hides would depend on how large and what colors you wanted to use. For a core, she recommends and I think most people use Leather Belting. Its used on older sewing machines and it is basically a long piece of leather that has been cut round. Oregon Leather Co is supposed to sell it but I can never find it on their website (http://www.oregonleatherco.com/) and have yet to call them. If you buy some, check to make sure it is on a spool and not already cut into lengths for sewing machines because they add hooks to the ends and they may not be the right length for what you want to do. You should buy two different sizes of belting for your cores (one for the reins and one for the romal) and if you use the same size string, you can do 8 strand on the reins and 12 on the romal. For example, use 3/16" for the reins and 5/16" for the romal and you can do 8 on the reins and 12 on the romal with 1/8" strings. If you are really wanting to make a pair I suggest buying Gail's book because she does a very nice job covering just about everything that goes into the project. Hope that helps, CW

Brian, Thanks for clearing up the order that I should work in. Shelly, Thanks for all the great pointers. The only reason I was wetting the strings was because the hide seemed really dry as I am pretty sure it was chrome tanned, and it just wasnt cutting very smoothly. After I let them soak for a bit I put them in plastic bags to case some and it seemed to help things. Hopefully I am going to be able to go back home (Ohio) at some point over the summer so Ill just have to make a stop in Centerville and save money on shipping. Are you going to the Derby this year? If so Ill try to get some stuff made up and have you take a look at what Im doing wrong. Thanks again for the help CW

Howdy Everyone, I am having some trouble finding somewhere that I can buy the Injector Razor Blades for my lace cutter. I know that I can get them off the internet at places like Amazon and eBay, but I was really hoping to find them in town so I didnt have to pay shipping on something so small and cheap (also I dont want to wait for them to get here). I asked at Harbor Freight, Lowes, Hobby Lobby, JoAnn Fabrics, just about everywhere that I could think and no one even knew what I was talking about. Have a good one, CW

Howdy Everyone, So I finally got a lace cutter and it is one made by Wayne Jueschke. I also bought a very nice hide of 5/7 latigo that i started cutting into lace this week. It took me a little bit to finally get a feel for it and stop cutting the lace in half, but I am still having some problems. I marked out this hide into a couple different circles because there was one very large area that was all good and a few places that I had to cut around, so on the largest part I cut it down to 1/2" with my draw gauge and then split it from there. The other places I cut the circles out and cut the lace off the rounds with ok success. I figured out that if I wet the hide string some before trying to split or bevel it things worked better, but one question I had was whether or not I should have stretched the string some after wetting it to make it straighter through the curves. Once I got it to the width I wanted, I tried to split it as best I could to about half of the width. This really isnt as easy as I thought because this type of splitter relies on the tension of the spring coil to keep the blade down, and if the string is too thick, it wont ride down as far and keep the split even. I know that this type of cutter is not really designed for a heavy leather such as latigo, so that may be the root of most of my problems. After splitting, I beveled the flesh side corners just like you do with kangaroo, but I dont think things are quite right with my bevels. Should they go all the way to the edge of the hair side like in A in the attached picture, or stop a bit before that, leaving a bit of a straight edge like in B? I braided up a bit today for a pair of hobbles and the edges of the strands are raised just a bit (enough to not suit me). I will post pics when I am finished as I dont have a digital camera at the moment and I'll have to find one to borrow. I braided 8 strands of 1/8" and rolled it after finishing the braiding and it did fix some of the edge problem but not all. Also, the back side of my braid is slightly larger than the front and on one side of the hobbles, it evened out when I rolled it, the other side didnt after rolling it. WIll the 8 strand braid always be square unless you use a core? Or will solving my beveling problems make it more round? How should I go about cutting lace smaller than 1/8"? Should I just start say at 1/16th and cut that from the round or should I cut 1/8" first and then cut it again? Anytime I try to go smaller than 1/8", it just curls the string between the blade and the guard and doesnt cut anything it just compresses it. Again, this may be due to the fact that I am using latigo instead of something like kangaroo. Sorry for the wall of text, I have just had a bunch of questions come up and had to get them out of my head. Thanks for looking and any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thats what I was thinking too as far as the square braid goes. Or its also the foundation for a Turks Head Terminal knot.

Tim, Thats a really nice job on the scrapbook! I really like how you framed your daughter's name with the leaf and stem work rather than push it up to the top of the area. It really draws you eye in while still keeping the work up front. Where did you get the font for her name? I'm hoping you didn't freehand it so I can find it somewhere and copy it lol. Once again, VERY nice job

Yeah after I posted that I was trying to think of an alternative, and couldnt come up with one. I really dont think you will have a problem unless she is really bad like a few that I have seen that actually learned to lope with the hobbles on lol. I would just watch to see how tight they are when you put them on.

Hey megabit, They look real nice, the only suggestion I would make would be to watch the ring knot that slides to tighten the loops around the knots, because since you make them out of rawhide, they may rub a raw spot, especially if they are on a horse that doesn't understand what hobbles are and try to walk off with them on. Depending on how tight you make the hobbles on the horse, this may not be an issue at all. Just my .02

If you want to have the colors match up on each side like this, you should start your braid with the colors alternating. So, Black, Brown, Black Brown, that way when you cross your two inside strands at the beginning of the braid, you will get Black Black Brown Brown and then the colors will match up on the corresponding side. They will actually be on the opposite side from which they start since each strand goes on the "outside" of the braid. So if you start with both black strands on the left, they will appear to be on the right side when you go over one under one. I think the biggest problem you have with that piece of braiding is the fact that there is a twist in the braids. This is caused by pulling harder on one side than the other so make sure your braids all match up straight and are pulled evenly. Just one more aspect of braiding that comes from practice. The barber pole effect that Knothead was talking about is from starting the braids with each color on the same side, then crossing the two middle strands. This would make your strands alternate in color (Black Brown Black Brown) and would give you this spiral effect. When you get up to eight strands, you can change things up even more and have the colors on the same side or if you alternate them, you will end up with a chevron pattern throughout the braid. Its all about how you set up your strands initially.

Hey Louie, I know that alot of braiders use tape (bookbinding, athletic. electric. etc.) to build up their nose buttons mainly because you save a good bit of time as well as you have the opportunity to carve on the tape if the shape doesnt come out completely round or symmetrical. As far as wax thread goes, I would say that would work just fine, but it would take an extreme amount of time and as far as adding to the strength of the bosal goes, the real functionality of the bosal doesnt warrant itself to needing more strength. Depending on what you used for a core, there should be no way for a horse to pull through a bosal that has a decent sized core and more than 8 strands to the foundation braids. you can also use Spanish Ring knots in even places through the nose button to give yourself benchmarks for roundness and thickness to build the nose button around. I wouldnt feel bad though about using tape on the bosals, because they are just there for shape and to give you a foundation. The tape really doesnt do anything to add to or take away from the overall function of the bosal. Oh, and next time you have any braiding questions, I would post them in the Braiding section of the forum. Youre more likely to get the help you need there since the only reason I found this was I bored and looking through different sections of the forum. Hope I was able to help, Aggiebraider

Hey Brian, That bracelet looks great. I dont have any experience attaching a clasp like that and was wondering how it was done. Also, what pattern is that? I think it looks great but cant get it straight in my head how you would originally lay out the strings to produce that pattern. Looks great

Very nice work lilpep, I really like that heel knot and I wish you had some pics of the foundation without rawhide on because I have never seen one like that and cant quite figure it out in my head. One word of advice though, you might want to shape the bosal some as it is very flat across the noseband and if it is going to be used, I think that will cause it to rub fairly bad around the corners of the jaw. You might try putting a coffee can in the middle and wrap a piece of leather around the cheeks fairly tight and leave it for a week, just to get it back to a more round shape. If you were already going to do that ignore everything I just said and just take my congrats on making such a unique bosal. Megabit - to my knowledge they work just as well as a conventional bosal as long as you make the diameter of the cheeks small enough as to not be really bulky like two full size bosals laying next to each other. I want to make one similar to this for my brother to use as a tie down, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to add either a ring or some other way for you to add a tiedown to a bosal like this. I know in Grant's book he has a bosal that there is a loop in the bottom that he spliced the two sides together and brought it together with a ring knot, but for using this as a tie down, I feel wouldnt be quite secure enough. Once again lilpep great job!

Hey guys, Since I hadn't seen many posts lately and PJ just emailed me pictures of my finished fid, I thought I would post them so everyone can drool over them while I wait for USPS. Total length of the fid is 5 1/4" with a small size head with a 5/16" shank running the length of the handle. The handle is made from macassar ebony. I wanted to let everyone know how great PJ was to work with. He took individual measurements of my hand and helped design a fid that both of us thought would be comfortable and functional for those long hours plaitin. I honestly could not be more happy with my new fid, cant wait to put it to use.

Thanks so much for the compliments. Those are about like everything else I make, I can see all the problems, but no one else notices them. That was the first project I made after getting Gail Hought's books and was finally able to do the long pineapple knots. Even though they are huge compared to ones you would make from leather, They add alot of needed weight to the reins as they are really light when you get everything braided up since I used 4 strand for the reins. I had A LOT of trouble getting the knots to be consistently the same size and shape and atleast one of them I remember didnt cover the tape job very well and you could see tape through the knot. I actually didnt take the core out of any of the strands, except for the ones I used to make the buttons. The paracord that I was getting was premo stuff, but I still had what you described with the 8 strand braid where the back is a little wider than the front. I pulled each and every braid as tight as humanly possible and this didnt change. It ALWAYS did it, and I used 8 strand ALOT (for neck ropes and jerk lines). It does go away when you use a core as I have a 10 strand (8 with 2 strands as a core) mecate that I made a few years ago and its pretty round. But having said all that, I think that with use, your braids will kind of settle in (not loosen), and this goes away. You might also try rolling your finished product just like you do with leather/rawhide, I dont know but that might help.

I actually made a romal rein out of parachute cord for a friend and she loves them. She said she has gotten quite a few compliments about them as well. I used a 4 strand round for the rein and i think a either an 8 strand around 2 for a core or a 12 strand for the romal and still put the buttons on the romal for the extra weight. For an everyday using set, they work pretty well. Sorry for the bad picture its actually the only one I have of them and its from my phone. Sorry didnt mean to hijack your thread, just thought you might like to see some that someone else had made as well

Im not really sure about this because the last place I saw talked about the 8 plait end being the end towards the honda and then turned around and said it was the other half. The only explanation I can give from growing up roping (not with a reata though) is that having 8 strands (as long as the finished product was the same size throughout and the strands were just split in half) at the half towards the loop would give your loop some more feel and more finesse. This would mainly be due to the braids being smaller and closer together, therefore more places to bend. Where as having the 8 strand half at the other end would maybe give you more feel and control in your dally. Controlling your reata in the dally is really important as you want the reata to slip a good bit (but not uncontrollably) as you dont actually jerk cattle down with a reata, rather you gradually decrease their forward movement. Also one reason why you dont want to use a reata with a saddle that has rubber on the horn and why Wade saddles have such a large horn (makes it easier to control your dally). As far as braiding one out of kangaroo, Im not sure how well this would work, just due to the fact that it seems kangaroo leather is not nearly as abrasion resistant as rawhide and you would need to be able to slide your dally around the horn, as well as what would be happening to the strands at your loop when heeling something and dragging it around through brush. Again this is all speculation as I have never actually swung a reata

Thanks for the heads up on the hemostat supplier. Ill have to go through it tomorrow and get an order in. Does anyone else have any experience with using hemostats on roo? Or is there a better way to temporarily keep everything in place?

Hey Brian, I noticed in your earlier photos that you were using hemostats to secure your braiding while taking a break. I use these all the time when I am braiding parachute cord, but I was wondering, do the hemostats mark up the leather any when clamped down? It looked like in the first post you used smooth hemostats, but in a later one you had one with teeth. One would think that the teeth would mark up the roo leather pretty badly, but I wasnt sure if you figured out a way to fix/prevent this. I know that typically you wouldnt need hemostats on rawhide as it is stiff enough to hold itself in place even when tempered, but roo is much to soft to do so. Also, where do you get your hemostats? I typically try to find some good ones at flea markets, but have a heck of a time finding any that arent sprung out either at the nose end, or at the handle end making it almost impossible to clamp them shut. I have done this myself to a few pairs, and tried to bend them back, but over enough time I actually broke a couple pairs. I have even tried to get some from vets that they may not want in their surgical packs anymore, but they are asking either too much for them, or they are worthless due to previously mentioned problems. This was actually kind of a big question I had because I would think that in order to prevent damage to the leather and without a good method for temporarily securing the braids, a person would have to just sit and braid the piece they were working on without stopping. Which would make bathroom breaks and phone calls a bad interruption lol. So if anyone has any advice on this I would really appreciate it. Thanks, Calvin

Jerry its funny you posted that I ran across that post a week or so ago and showed it to my roommate who is also an Aggie grad student like myself and we both thought it was great. That whip should be hanging in some old Ags place and never leave the wall. Great work!

Hey Lilpep, I really like the graduated walling you did on the bottom (i assume bottom) end with the three knots getting successively smaller. I was having a little trouble figuring out the almost basketweave pattern in the middle, but I think it is U2 O2, U3 O3, U4 O4, U5 O5, with each change in number being a new string, please let me know if I am wrong, but I wasnt sure if that alternated in any way or if each strand that started U2 O2 continued in the same manner or if it changes to being an U2 O2 in one pass to being say U5 O5 in the next pass. Great work on this, cant wait to get some leather and give fid work a go.