shtoink

No problem. I like to mix it up a bit now and then. I'm just glad you were able to decipher the gibberish with that last post. No idea what caused that malformed sentence to come forth from my fingertips.

I did try to something more useful right after the jokes...

Maybe it doubled as a knife to cut and serve up your roasted meats... Slice, poke, serve. All joking aside, it's possible that it may have been used to score the leather or even open holes in the leather a little bit. Obviously, just pure speculation.

Ahhh... The dreaded Goldfish Syndrome. I have a similar issue when present with shiny objects. I don't smoke a pipe, but found a couple of very cool looking pipes while second hand shopping that might be fun to make a holder for. I'll be watching how things progress with this thread with interest.

Does this topic make anyone else think of Bob Marley? Not that this is very helpful or anything... On the buffalo, I believe that it's a tougher leather to tool than cow, but not as tough as horse butt.

One thing to keep in mind is that these are going to be neodymium magnets are are very capable of ruining the strips on any kind of card you may have. These things are extremely strong. It won't be the magnet just being near your cards, but the act of passing them through the field they produce that can ruin the cards. Myth Busters had some fun with that subject. I'm not trying to say you shouldn't use them, but it's something to keep in mind if they are going to be placed near where a wallet will be pulled in/out of a pocket or something similar.

My first guess would be the condition of the cutting edge. That looks more like it's grabbing and tearing than cutting.

I just wanted to make sure you got your question answered, which is difficult if the right eyes never see it.

There is a area that is meant for exactly this kind of question in the Saddles Section of the forum. Just follow the link and you'll see the Saddle Construction area.

To really give a good assessment, I think that pictures would be very helpful in this case. Aside from that, it doesn't sound like you were given the wrong tools and possibly the wrong leather. I would not have spent any money until after my questions were answered on subject. 11 SPI seems wrong, but it can depend on what you are trying to do. You might be able to get away with that many stitches per inch on some thinner leather, but certainly not with the thicker stuff/ On the needles, some can be sharps and others not. I have some that look like really thick sewing needles and others that look flat. If you are pulling a thick thread through the leather, the needle type would be more appropriate and if you are using lace, then you need a different type. As far as the leather goes, I can't say much without some pictures. From your description, though, it doesn't sound good. Scrap is good for practice, but you'll eventually want to make something bigger than those scrap pieces can provide. Also, you generate your own scrap pieces when you start cutting out your patterns. It might be worthwhile to see how much shipping would be from some online dealers to where you are. That way you can go by the recommendations from those in here or from a reputable dealer and not have to worry about being swindled by some crazy shop owner. There are some good threads in here on what tools are good for getting started. It'll take a little bit of searching and reading, but it'll be free, which is a whole lot cheaper than getting the wrong stuff because you just don't know yet. There are even some articles on making your own tools or decent substitutes until such time that a proper one can be obtained. I personally got lucky and inherited the majority of my tools from my grandfather, however there are quite a few in that mix that I have not even used yet because the need has never presented itself. Basically, there are plenty of tools that can be skipped until they are actually needed depending on the projects you want to do. The point I am trying to get at is that you can build on your tool collection slowly, as you need them, and more reading through the topics in here on that subject can help you narrow that list down. The topic of leather types can get quite complicated, too. But they all boil down to some basic types. The good news, all that information is in here and it just takes some searching and reading. I just hope that I was enough help and that you don't give up on this. It can be very discouraging to be mislead by someone like that and I know all too well how it feels.

This may not come as much of a surprise to many, but is still worth bringing up. After some chatting about leather dust created on projects with some of the regulars in the chat room a little while back, I couldn't get it out of my head. There was one thing that kept nagging my mind and I finally decided to put some research into it. It didn't take long to find and I was a bit surprised at just how serious a matter it has the potential to be. It's the possibility of nasal and lung cancer from exposure to the carcinogens in the dust created from sanding, grinding, and buffing leather. The solution is a simple one: Dust masks. During my searches, it was mentioned on one site that there was about 10 times fewer articles on leather crafting hazards than wood working hazards. That should not be much of a surprise, though. There aren't as many people working with leather as there are with wood. I know that I am guilty of failing to observe the use of dust masks and many an occasion, I just had no idea just how risky it actually was. As with everything else carcinogenic, it may or may not affect you quickly. There are plenty of smokers out there who never develop a smoking related cancer after 40+ years at it, but on the opposite end of the spectrum there are those that develop a cancer within a few years of starting. Bottom line, you just never know if and when it can happen, but it can't hurt to err on the side of caution and wear some protective gear when you do things that put you at risk for these sorts of things. This isn't scare tactic of any type. I'm not trying to make anyone stop messing with their leather or prevent anyone from starting. I just wanted to bring the potential risk, and a solution, to the attention of those that may not know. Dust masks are the way to go. If you'd like to read a little more information on the subject, I have a link here and here. The other option is to use my original search terms and look around for yourself. "leather dust carcinogen" Once again, this isn't to scare anyone, only educate with the risks and provide a solution for prevention.

As far as I know, the Olympus cameras still use the XD memory cards and you'd need to get a card reader. Unless I am incorrect and they have switched to SD cards. My laptop, and the last several, have an SD card reader built in. For some reason, the newer SDHC cards don't work on mine, and I still end up needing a card reader. My vote is for the card reader, since the transfer speeds will generally be faster than plugging the camera in to the computer.

I wasn't thinking that full control over post deletion should be given to a general member. What I had in mind was the ability to delete a post for a short window of time, if it did not have any posts following it, or if it was something like an accidental duplicate post. As far as editing old posts, it'd be good housekeeping. I see plenty of sullied up threads because image links no longer work and they have to be added in further down the line. It gets pretty ugly and makes for a difficult read. Not to mention, it's not clear what people are quoting about with earlier posts being broken. Maybe the image cleanup and such should be left up to a moderator and there could be one mod per section or something. Bottom line, limiting the general members from altering old posts has brought about its own problems. I just did some digging around in the forum over at IP.Board and it appears that there aren't the opens for control over deletion that I had thought there would be. I know it exists in other PHP driven forum packages. I saw a few posts with questions similar to what I had in mind, but there hasn't been anything implemented like that, as of yet. The closest thing I saw reference to, was something called "Hide" which acted as a soft delete and required moderator interaction beyond that point. It wasn't clear if it was forum wide or not, as the discussions went into greater detail than I could follow without having an actual moderator control panel in front of me. Art, I do see your point and agree to a certain extent, but we aren't all delete crazy people here. Maybe the option for that "middle ground" of control for us general members will eventually show up and the way the forum handles post deletion will evolve, who knows. Either way, I still like the idea of being able to fix grammar and spelling, reword, add/alter image links, and similar non-destructive edits to my posts.

I know that there is currently a short window of time to be able to go back and edit a post you made, but it would really be nice to have that window of time made longer. I will do my best to explain why I think this would be a good idea. I had quite a few reasons, but most seemed kind of trivial, so I boiled it down to these three. I have no doubt that others might find some very compelling reasons that had not occurred to me. First Reason: Say you come back the next day and found spelling or grammar errors you want to clear up. Maybe you wanted to alter a certain passage in your post some way to better convey your original idea. I've personally had this happen and find it frustrating. Second Reason: Maybe you had some steps to a tutorial you provided and found that, for some reason, these steps were in error or needed some slight modification. It'd be a lot less confusing to alter the original post than to add one with the desired information further down the thread. Third Reason: This might be the biggest reason. Lets say that you made a tutorial or some other post that was image heavy and something happened that made those links not work anymore. Maybe you needed to move your images to another provider or switched domains, whatever the reason, your links no longer work for the original post. This makes that post useless unless you can go back and edit it. It'd save a lot of work and you wouldn't need to clutter up the thread with a duplicate post further into the thread. I think what this boils down to is that the window for the edit option should be open indefinitely for the original poster. It may not be needed in plenty of cases, but the option to go back and perform any necessary house keeping is very convenient. Fixing silly grammar and spelling mistakes or even the links to images in and old thread that was stickied long ago makes for less clutter overall. At least, that's my theory on it. On a side note, it'd be very nice to be able to delete a thread that you may have written that is now pointless and adds no useful content to the forum.

I think WinterBear is right. If you look through the rest of the items that seller has, you can see that there are several others adorned with things normally found plugging up the superfluous holes someone into body modification might typically have.

I wasn't sure where else to put this since it was tool specific, but wasn't really anything more than a description of the process. I thought it might be interesting to "see" things from the point of view of the the designer and possibly get some insight on the thought process. I will do my best to not get too technical, as those kinds of details just tend to bog everything down and make for a boring read. It is my hope that those of you possibly wanting to give making your own tools will glean some information from this and give it a shot and those of you who haven't given any thought as to what goes into the development of a single tool might gain some appreciation for the hard work and frustration that is generally unseen. I started with an idea when I was browsing around to see what kinds of different knives were out there. I saw all manner of designs and quality, but the one thing that 99% of these knives had in common was that they were all made from metal. I also felt that I had the tools and know-how to give a go at making one or two of my own, but I didn't want to copy what already out there. I wanted a tool that I wanted to use. Having picked up and played with several knives and found them to be nothing close to what I wanted pushed the idea of making my own knife further to the front. It wasn't just a spur of the moment thing and I took some time mucking about with different ideas before settling on what I wanted to try first. This was when I posted the question to the forum asking about what people like or didn't like about their knives. It didn't go anywhere near as well as I had envisioned, but it wasn't a complete loss and I pushed forward. I also wanted to incorporate some of the knowledge gained from making crochet hooks for my wife. (She had issues with the plastic ones due to the molding seam and the metal ones made her hands ache so she couldn't crochet for very long. Wood was the answer, but not just any wood, it had to be dense, hard and fine grained.) Several attempts were made before a functional prototype even happened. After it was finished, it was glaringly obvious that I still needed to work out a few bugs and design issues before I had something that looked like anything more than an amateur hack was let loose in the garage. My biggest issue, wrong material! I have tried out quite a few difference species of exotic hardwood and found some to work and some that just don't. I also found that there were serious flaws in the way I had originally planned on machining and assembling these things. Each step forward seemed to put me two steps back. I was mainly using the materials that I had on hand, so it became abundantly clear that I needed to source specific sized materials of appropriate type to do things the right way after finding plenty of ways to do it wrong. I was using some 1/4" cold rolled steel rod that was laying around to make the yoke shafts, but it required machining it down to a smaller diameter and then putting a super smooth and shiny finish on it. After that, it required putting threads on one end and machining a flat spot for the set screw to bite on. This was very time consuming and brought about issues with trying to keep that shiny finish while trying to cut threads and machine the flat. Each time was met with failure to keep that finish. I ultimately decided to source some annealed drill rod of the proper diameter that already had that smooth finish. Cutting the proper sized hole in the barrel for the bearings was another major hurdle. I was initially just starting with a drilled hole and then slowing increasing the size of the bored hole, but that was time consuming. A solution was to get an appropriately sized ream to bring it to the finished size. Once again, a solution brought about new challenges. I ended up splitting quite a few potential barrels. I also wanted to test if using a brass insert to help increase the strength might be an option, however that turned out to be a dead end, since I couldn't ream the brass tubing without destroying the test pieces Drilling the holes and cutting threads for the set screws became a problem as I could only create ugly looking set screws. I switched to some premade ones that looked nicer, but they still need some tweaking to get the to clear the tight spaces they were going to reside. I also needed to find a way to keep the threads from just being puled out, since the one set screw is threaded into the wood barrel. The solution was a simple flat spot on the shank of the blade. It allowed a positive bite on the blade with less force involved. The same solution was used for the yoke shaft. Another feature I wanted was the ability to keep the yoke captive. It needed to be adjustable, but not fall out when the set screw was loosened. I was keeping a larger diameter bit at the bottom of the yoke shaft, but that interfered with machining operations. My solution for that came into play with the use of a straight chunk of drill rod. I drilled and threaded a hole in the bottom end so a small screw and washer could be attached. This was another instance where the solution brought about a whole new set of problems. I was having problems getting the proper RPMs on the lathe to prevent the stuff from hardening while machining it. Very frustrating. It would be soft one second and nearly as hard as the HSS tools I'm cutting with the next. I broke a drill bit and two taps trying to get the problems worked out. Another issue that I have been trying to work around in damaging the bearings when pressing them in. This is also a critical time for the barrel, since the added stresses can cause it to split if I haven't done everything else right. What was happening was that I was dimpling the races of the bearings as the pressure was getting applied to the inner race instead of the outer one where it would be safe. This was permanent damage and made the bearings unsuitable for smooth and free movement. This proves difficult when trying to get things to line up just right in such a confined space. I think I have worked out how it can be done, but it requires more testing. One of the last issues that has had me irritated is drilling the access hole for the yoke adjustment set screw. I have yet to get it in the right spot with measuring it out. The solution that I am working on involves a jig that I can load the bearing carrier with the bearings attached and locate the holes placement before inserting it into the barrel so that location can be transferred to the outside of the barrel. This meant designing a tool to help build the tool. All of this effort is for one goal, making a very high quality swivel knife from a material to help reduce hand fatigue made from a slightly unpredictable material. Each tools is unique and can easily be considered a one-off. It may have similarities to the others that get made, but everyone requires a little tweaking here and there along the way. I have invested an estimated 75 to 100 hours in this project already and I still do not feel that things are exactly the way I want them yet. It clearly isn't a simple task of taking something from the drawing board to a finished product, but I have enjoyed the challenge and I believe that I might actually be onto something. Despite all of the frustrations and failures along the way, I still feel like I am on the right track. It has also been a very huge learning experience, which is why I wanted to share it with you guys. It's not very often you get to hear about how things went wrong in the development of something that seems so simple. I keep thinking of the quote from Edison... "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." There is quite a bit of truth to that. We learn more from our failures than we do from our successes. The evolution of the shape and design, as well as the optimization of the machining and assembling, of a single tool is governed by the desired outcome and the series of problems that arise and how they are overcome.

Welcome fellow Washingtonian... It's good to see someone else from the most diverse state in the U.S. I've been over there to Yakistan a few times, usually to the YTC, but prefer to stay on the west side of the mountains. Havamal's quite lucky being right up the road from one of the Tandy's in the state. It takes me about an hour to drive there from where I am.

Well, so as to not sound insane, I found the post I referenced earlier from someone here who uses an airbrush to apply the neatsfoot oil. Here it is... I guess the main point is that there isn't really a wrong way to apply it as long as it isn't overdone.

I use the photobucket route, too. The nice thing with photobucket is being about to edit photos through the web based editor. There's a simplified version, but towards the bottom is a link to opt for the more advanced editor. I have not tried to use the web based editor through the browser on the phone, but once you've gotten uploaded you can easily edit, resize, and manipulate the image to your heart's content before generating the links for the images. The interesting thing is that the web based editor is actually a freely available (and full featured pay version) app for the iPhone called Pixlr by AutoDesk. I can't speak for any sort of availability on android, but there are a few alternatives to aid in any editing and resizing needs you might need. PhotoShop Express is free and has a decent set of features, is one that comes to mind. I would recommend at least resizing the images before uploading them, since straight from the phone they can be particularly large depending on the options you have set for your camera. File size and image dimensions, both. I do want to say that photobucket is working on a new layout for the website and it leaves a few features behind. Unless I missed it, one of those features is the option to select which photos in a current album you wish to have it generate link codes for you to post or link to. As mush as I like to newer style layout, I am still using the older style so that I still have access to that feature. It is possible that I am overlooking where this feature is in the new layout, as it is quite different from the older style. If someone knows for sure on this, please don't hesitate to say something.

What's fun is that middle section doesn't have to be a straight line. Yours looks to be curved, but you could do just about any shape you'd like. A fleur de lis or some flames might be interesting, too. Just some ideas to play with...

What I am seeing is basically two options. Buy one or build one. Buy one: If you are going to buy one, your budget is the limiting factor and you usually get what you pay for. Cheap tools will typically yield cheap results. I just don't know how many companies actually have make one of these tools, so you might be stuck with reevaluating your budget due to a limited number of choices. Build one: It might not be the easy route, but it's an option. You might be able to make your own, or depending on your skills and available tools, have someone assist you in that task. It might not be the cheaper route, either. Basically a metal plate with threaded holes to accept the replacement hole punch ends and an end punch affixed to it somehow is what you are after. The other key is some way to apply enough force to press it into a leather strap. What I am thinking it something along the lines of a modified arbor press, a metal plate, some parts from Tandy or other supplier, and a big cutting mat/board to press against.

Whatever the outcome, you already have a toehold. If you get the grant, you can push forward full throttle. If you don't, you can push forward incrementally as your budget allows. From the sounds of it, you have gotten to where you are on your own and there is nothing that says you can't keep it as a "hobby" that pays for itself and build on it until it becomes more. Yes, it'd be a bummer to not get the grant as it would really give you some breathing room, but, regardless, you still have your skills, tools, supplies, and drive to do something creative with them. Grant or no, I'm just not seeing a downside. Say you get it, you breathe a sigh of relief and push forward with your plans. Say you don't get it, you breathe a sigh of relief that the pressure of not knowing is gone and you pursue the very same plans at your own pace as your time and budget allows. Same results, just different paths. Maybe I am not seeing the whole picture, but it looks to me as though all the stress is related to the song and dance and hoop jumping the VA makes you do before they give you anything. It's the not knowing if they will or will not release the funds to you after performing all the tricks ask you to that makes this whole thing scary. Try not focusing on "will they, won't they" aspect, but rather how either outcome will be a relief because you'll know what you need to do next no matter what happens.

+1 for modifying a tool that's not exactly what you want. There's no rule that says you can't... Just make sure you spend a little time polishing the surfaces you grind on up a bit.

I wish I was able to look this over in person. I just feel like I am not getting the full picture with it and what it's purpose was. It clearly looks like a specialized stitching pony, but what for? Does that board along the side come out and what does that wedge shaped part actually do? What might the part sticking out at an angle do? I have been staring at this thing and racking my brain trying to figure it out. One of the ideas I have is If it might be used for opening up the boot for putting in the decorative stitching or maybe the for holding the boots of a prosthetic limb. The issue with those ideas is the lack of clearance for your hands between the arms. You can clearly see there is greater wear on the tip of one arm and it appears that is the same arm that gets moved more. The other thing that keeps drawing my eye to it is that large groove up the frame between the arms. Was there some sort of shuttle that needed that groove for clearance? Was is possible it was used for making some type of woven rope or other tube shaped thing?

I guess you just don't leave your leather hanging out of the rounder overnight. All joking aside, it's good information to keep in mind, but as long as it isn't being left in there for extended periods of time it should present no problems for normal use.