Shaunny Rotten

Thanks folks, I'll give it a shot over the weekend. On a side note, has anybody had any success with Shoe Goo?

I have a project that requires a seam with no stitching. I've always had less than satisfactory results when using glue in the past, however this seam will have to rely on it 100% It's 1/8" thick leather wrapped around a roughly 1 1/4" dowel and the glue surface is a scarf joint with a roughly 9/16" contact patch. Ideally I would like recommendations for a product available from Tandy as I have one close to me but if their products wont work I am willing to look elsewhere. Shaun.

Oltoot, thank you. You have pretty much typed out exactly what I was thinking.

I have some leather that has formed rather well in the past and has a lot of stretch to it. The hope is that I can stretch it into shape more than compress the extra leather down. What I'm going to have to do is (assuming it goes even remotely close to how I want it) soak the leather until it is completely saturated, tack it to the form and then draw it through the die plate, allowing the leather to dry while still through the die plate. The folds and extra bulk would have to be left on until the piece was completely dry, and then trimmed to length. The entire process sounds futile, I'm aware, however I'm willing to give it a try. Even if it fails I'll have learned something. As for the end use, It's part of an illusion for a magician I've known since high school.

I've had a request to make a seamless leather tube, roughly 1" in diameter and 2 1/2" tall made from 1/8" thick leather. I was thinking of cutting out a circle, with a hole in the center the same size as my dowel form and nailing the center of the leather ring to the form, then using various implements of force and destruction pushing the form and leather through a hole in a board that is 1 1/4" wide. The thought is that I can stretch the ring into a tube. Has anybody ever tried something like this? The easier way would be to just cut a rectangle of leather and scarf joint it using some contact cement to glue it together but that would still leave too much of a seam for my customer.

Dyed and finished.

The bags are 20 mil thick

I'll try to get you that information by the end of the day.

This one was around 4/5 oz. I'm still pretty new at leather work so I used what I had on hand. Triage, enjoy.

They hold up great. I know quite a few people who use them for woodworking of various descriptions. Mostly making skateboards and longboards. Wood can beat the tar out of vac bags and these ones stand up repetitive use like no other. Most of the systems that I've seen on the market try to keep costs down by giving you a crappy bag and a mid range electric pump, however these bags are top notch. The pump that comes with it could draw enough vacuum to suck start a harley.

I got the kit from a company in Toronto called Roarockit. It's their Thin Air Press kit with a 26x28 bag. It's a manual pump that draws a better vacuum than a any of the electric pumps that I have used. The kit can be found here: http://www.roarockit.com/proddetail.php?prod=01301

This morning's progress. There really isn't a lot of depth to the detail on this rubber gun. For instance the ejector port is only set back from the top of the slide by about 1/32" The left side of it is fairly plain and I am really happy with the amount of detail that the bag was able to produce. The only forming that I needed to do manually was right at the front of the trigger guard but I figured that I would need to do that anyways. This is one of the most effective vac bags that I have used' date=' and it's also one of the most inexpensive I've ever found. As for the shape, I'm sure I went wrong it a few places and I'll be sure to address those issues in later designs, however this was merely supposed to be a test of the vac bag on leather. The gun clicks into the holster quite nicely and there's no worry of it falling out. Most of the time it draws smoothly however every once and a while it jams in there pretty good and I need to use two hands to remove it from the holster. [/color']

Simple holster I am currently working on, threw it into the vac bag to see what happened. I like the results so far.

That looks great What method did you use to form this?

Credit where it's due. This is the instruction set I followed to create the holster template.http://leatherworker.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=19338 Thanks Rohn