bruce johnson

Brent, Your comment about making comfy house shoes reminds me when we had the thread goiung about skirting scraps. I think your comment was "One man's scrap is another man's keyfob". Still laughing about that. I can manage my skirting scrap alright, but I run out of ideas for woolskins pretty fast. I might need some comfy house shoes now.

Saddle looks good there. I am with JW and like a little more skirt in front. The border looks good on the rough out too.

Steve, I have had a few emails overnight from people wanting to know a little more. Here's a little more background. My great-grandfather fed cattle, grandfather fed cattle. One great-grandfather was a buyer for John Morell. These were back in the days of the big terminal markets. My dad and two uncles were packer buyers, my dad bought hogs, two uncles bought fat cattle. One is still doing it and has since about 1965. I'll be talking to him this weekend and get his take, but I have some of my own thoughts too. I worked in the packing house and got about every crap job a guy could get. My brother didn't, and went on to get a PhD in meat science. My son works at cattle auctions 5 days a week. He sees cull cattle and feeders sell everyday. We are in a dairy area and the beef cattle are cow-calf or wintertime grass cattle/summers on irrigated clover. We aren't in a huge cattle feeding area other than Harris at Coalinga. They are kind of vertically integrated with their own feedlot and slaughter plant, so they are not the usual pattern of most. My thoughts on the fall off in hide weights I think may be due to a couple of factors. Age of the cattle at slaughter (PC term now is "harvest") is younger. One is the genetic base of the cattle. I can't say that the angus cattle have thinner hides necessarily, but they have created a pretty good promotional program for their beef so black hided English influenced cattle are popular. Cattle feeding areas have shifted south. There are still some feedyards in the northern plains, but the big guys are in the southern plains - KS,TX,OK. It can be argued that those cattle might be a little thinner hided due to that area not going through the same sustained winters of the northern cattle. Also there is more brahma influenced cattle in the south for heat resistance, and those hides are supposed to be thinner too. It used to be that a lot of upper midwest farmers had a feedlot behind the barn. They farm all summer, put up some silage and grain, sell the excess on the grain market. In the winter they fed 50-300 cattle. They may be home raised calves or bought feeders. Those guys are not as common as they used to be. The town I grew up in the midwest still has a weekly cattle sale. There are not as many salebarns running back there because there just aren't the cattle numbers to support them there used to be. Dairies have gotten bigger and have had some buy-out programs to help subsidize reduction of cattle numbers when milk prices go too low to be profitable. If you follow the 50% rule, for every heifer born that may go into the milking string, there is a dairy bull born that will end up a dairy feedlot steer. The old saw is that dairy breed hides are thinner. So in a nutshell, I think the runoff in domestic hides could be due to a few factors. Younger cattle, beef breeds represented in US cattle, climate, and the dairy influence.

JC, I sure respect other opinions, but have a few observations here. As you will read, I have some biases. First off, McDonalds may be a big beef buyer, but percentage wise very few cattle are specifically geared entirely to McDonalds. The biggest value in a carcass are the prime cuts - McDonalds are not grinding $10/pound filets and T-bones for $1 double cheeseburgers. They are grinding meat from cull cows and less valuable meat cuts for hamburger. I just have to ask about the statement that corn kills cows. What's the basis of that? I have decent enough family background in cattle feeding, meat packing and processing, and just enough nutrtional courses to be dangerous, I just don't see the correlation. Moldy corn can do it, cattle not acclimated to a "hot ration" can have problems, but corn as a rule does not kill cattle offhand. To answer one of your questions - yes, the hides from the cattle fed for slaughter are used in the leather industry. Some are fed cattle and some are older cull dairy and beef cattle. That is pretty much the source of most all the hides except for the identified slaughter free hides sold by Steve Siegel. Even the slaughter free hides may have come from a pasture or a feedlot. As far as the quality difference between the forage fed cattle vs. feedlot cattle - hard to say because anymore very few cattle are finished on forage and their hides specifically separated and tanned to be sold as grass cattle hides. It would be interesting, some rawhiders have definite opinions, but the tanned hides are just for the most part fed cattle. Probably the biggest difference in decreasing hide quality and size has to do with "progress" in the cattle business. Hides are smaller, and the quality is not what the older guys tell us it used to be. These cattle have been bred up to gain faster, more efficiently, and result in a more consistant product at a younger age than cattle in the past. The hides are still a by-product, not the primary goal. My great-grandfather used to buy a trainload of long yearling and two year old feeder cattle to put into the feedlot. He fed them and they went on the train to Chicago. He used to feed a pen of "steamers" for the fun of it - big overdone cattle whose steak would have an inch or more of fat left on it and spill over the plate. They were called steamers because they were served to the wealthy on steamships. You aren't going to find many cattle like that anymore. Think how big those hides were. We've all seen the videos on slaughterhouse abuses. They happen, but aren't widespread in the industry. There has been a lot of improvements in livestock handling, and slaughter procedures in the last century and some would argue that improvements have doubled in the last 10 years. I just have to take exception that there are no ethics in the slaughter industry. Respectfully,

It will have some to do with the leather. Firm hard leather even after oiled will still be firmer than soft leather. Some tanneries put out a firmer leather, some put out a softer leather.Some people prefer one over the other for whatever the intended purpose is. Not knowing the source or original intended purpose, it is hard to day what you have. Twelve oz could be skirting or it could be sole leather. They should behave differently. It may come from a tannery that puts out a firmer leather. To start with a new tannery or batch of leather I haven't dealt with before, I start with light coats and until I get a feel for how much oil that leather needs. After that, I am a little more comfortable slathering it on.

As long as it is flat and smooth, it will be fine. They do not have to be highly polished. I used the bottom side of a broken monument for years with no problem. The top was polished but had some lettering.

Add one to that list Bobby. I have Lexol conditioner in the casing mix.

Some of the braiding bar tools have a splitter that works pretty well for strings. I have sold a couple Chase pattern splitters to braiders too. With the top and bottom rollers, the strings stay pretty consistant. For the price of a good Chase splitter though, you can buy a string cutter/beveler/splitter.

I've got a few I have had done. I've got friend who has a laser and uses it on all kinds of things. This one I tooled the cover first and then she lasered in the graphics for the logo and lettering. I oiled it and assembled it afterwards. The lasering has held up better than I expected. Used daily and carried on a lot of travel. I have talked to a few people who have used lasers to transfer tooling pattern outlines onto leather and skip the tracing film/stylus deal.

Looks good Luke. Good job with the rawhide too.

I had one of their Pro models on a similar deal. If you leave the depth pointer on the one I had, it would split down to about 4 oz before it bottomed out, so it wouldn't do much on roo. I took the pointer off for lighter leathers. Mine was off and split a little more off to the right than the left side of the roller. I sold mine to guy who was a pretty handy machinist and he got it right. I got my money out of it. The manager sounds right, there are other choices that are better for what you are wanting to do.

JW, Another good tool to trim the excess single welt is a large round bottom edger.

I have an unmarked gouge that I suspect is a McMillen by the handle anyway. It is a scoop type gouge and the end looks somewhat like a small woodworkers's gouge. It makes a nice elongated half-rounded gouge. In cross section it tapers up without leaving sharp edges or shoulders like a French edger or the saddle makers gouges.

Ken, What you want is a pull-through leather splitter with a depth adjustment that moves while splitting to make the transitions to the skived/split area smoothly. An example of that would be handled splitter like an Osborne #84 splitter. That is not the machine to do what you are wanting to do. It will split the whole belt down if you use the wide foot, set it level, and set it up with the correct feedwheel for vegtan leather. It will not selectively do one area without a lot of practice and hassle. They feed pretty fast and would be hard to control for a short area. As a side note, I am not sure I would buy one from a seller that had no idea of the capabilities of what they are selling unless the price was so fabulous that I could afford to lose it if it didn't work out. Some of these are good and some are wore out from production work. There are other resellers around who know these machines and can give you a good idea of what they have and condition.

Thomas, I used to think mine were sharp until I spent some time with an old guy who could handsew a little. He took mine and made them so the acute angle sides of the awl will easily slice the edge of test piece of skirting. He worked the grits on some stones alternating with the edge and against the edge when he switched grits until the last grit on some wet dry (600). That he went into the edge until he had a foil edge the first 1" or so of blade and then stropped to remove the edge. He had that muscle memory to hold the angle constant and was quick about it. I have done that and can get the job done without as much effort now. I recently tried the 1x30 belt sander I have with superfine grit belts. With the platen as a backup and eyeing the angle from the top, I am getting pretty fair with that.

Roger, I use it some for inlays and also for a few purses. It actually works up about like a medium weight chap leather for me, maybe just a bit more body. The very surface seems to be harder than most leathers other than shark or stingray. I don't know who sells it in small pieces. Sometimes Springfield Leather sells exotic scrap. I got a couple scrap bags of ostrich with some decent sized pieces from them last spring. They might have a handle on some elephant the same way.

I added a few more tools today - Two rein trimmers - a Gomph and a CS Osborne. Also the handiest saddler hammer I have used - 10" long, well balanced, and clean. Iam keeping the other one just like it.

Lasse, At least in the US, retired dairy cows are slaughtered to a huge extent. They almost all go to slaughter if they can walk. It is how the dairy people recoup some of their investment, much like spent laying hens go to soup. It is also how they use "buy-out" programs to send cows to slaughter and reduce milking cow numbers in oversupply/low milk prices times. The hides on these dairy cows tend to be bigger than beef hides although thinner. They are generally not branded (although a lot in my area are), and tend to have less scarring. They are still a by-product of the cattle industry, not the primary goal. Not many producers worry about the hide value at any point in the production of beef or dairy cattle.

Drop the skirts and push them up. Sometimes you can push them up one at a time into the channel without dropping the skirts and spray/soak them with warm water to break down that kink and then pull them over.

I have worked both sides of this animal death deal in some pretty good numbers - slaughter, natural death - attended and not, euthanasia, gunshot for something you can't handle, etc. and am not about to argue the merits of one vs the other. A good share of the population is now removed from the farm and seeing death first hand by a few generations. They are 40ish and thanks to health care advances, both grandparents are still alive. The first death most of them personally face is their pet. I do have some thoughts on the rest of the discussion. I think one thing that is continuing to be overlooked and Steve just mentioned it is that animals die and these hides do exist and they can go to the tannery, get processed into another byproduct, or drug to the back pasture bonepile. These hides are still by-products. These animals all were raised with some economic or production goal in mind. They may have outlived that, or they may never have lived long enough to fulfill that. These cattle are not frolicing in the pasture or living on some pensioner farm awaiting death so they can be skinned for "slaughter free hides" as their primary goal in life. The only difference between these hides and the others is a premortem inspection (at least in the US)and being pulled off the animal in an inspected facility. The slaughter-free die and are then loaded to go to a processing facility. Just how big that niche market is for leather coming from cattle who didn't die in a packing house I don't know. It hasn't been around long enough and explored enough to be tested yet. This is really the first time out, and for the right maker with the right clientele, it could be a bonus.

I have listed a few more knives for sale tonight on my website. These are all good solid vintage knives - sharp and ready to use. If you are interested, here is the link - Leather Tools for sale . Thanks,

I would suspect the milled feed roller is slipping. There is a spot for the set screw in that roller to seat into the shaft. It doesn't just bind against the shaft, it seats into it in one spot for a positive movement. You may need to take that set crew out, then slowly move the roller around with a flashlight in the screw hole to find where it should seat.

Julia, There are sure two ways and both work. There are regional and personal biases for either way and it is kind of one of those saddlemaker's debates that won't ever be solved. Personally,I use maybe heavier strings than some people do. Some of my customers tie doctoring bags and saddlebags on. A lot of kids pull themselves up with a string. Lighter strings will break before they tear out leather, a stronger string pulls leather. The problem when they pull leather is they tear off the front jockey or seat jocket at the cantle ear. These are pretty expensive repairs.

I am with JW, I use tugs whenever I can. On some of the repairs I have to deal with pocketed bars and just don't like them. Sometimes they don't pull up tight and it is a pain to resew them through the woolskin. I use one twist nail and one drywall screw for my lugs. I've done a few pocketed bars for guys riding in the pines who worry about needles working in under the bars though. I drill for most strings, but only through the bars not the skirts. I gouge out the rawhide between my string holes and seal with a little varnish. The strings lay flat on the bottom of the bars. It makes them secure and easy to change when one breaks or is cut off for a repair. Unscrew the lugs, drop the skirt, restring, and screw the lug right back in the same hole. No fiddling around running one through the skirts and under the wool.

I added a few new tools today to my website. Gomph knives sold right off the bat, but I have a nice Chase pattern splitter, plough gauge, and hand tools left. Here's a link - Leather Tools for Sale . Thanks,