Jump to content

Reegesc

Contributing Member
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content Count

    444

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Reegesc

  2. Posted · Report reply

    1 hour ago, AndyL1 said:

    Thank you for the instructions on this! I’ve been thinking about making coin conchos. One question: where do you find the rivet snap tubes without the cap? I’d like to use Chicago screws as well but I have no clue where to find just the female end without a base. 

    Sorry, I don't understand your question.  For Chicago screws you use the female end with a base to solder to the coin.  For rivets you use the male end with a base to solder to the coin.  Then you use the rivet cap (female) or the Chicago screw (male) to attach the concho to leather.  

    I don't think there is such a thing as a rivet or Chicago screw without a base and certainly not without a cap or screw.  How would you attach it to anything without a cap or screw?

    Did you watch the video?  Pretty much explains it.   

     

  3. Posted · Report reply

    3 hours ago, Tugadude said:

    If the original post in this thread was a rant about Tandy Leather and a perceived lack of leadership, I think it is only fair to judge them by their current efforts.  Since that post was written Tandy Leather has overhauled their website, their entire pricing structure and introduced a number of new products.  Just recently they unveiled a new heat embosser, for example.  And they sell Barry King tools via their website.  I've written previously that they added the Ritza 25 Tiger Thread and that was a response to requests from the leather community.

    They have made many positive strides in recent months.  I don't think there is any question about that.

     

    Here's their Facebook page in case you want to check it out.

    https://www.facebook.com/tandyleather/

    Well, it's a start...but they have a long way to go.  The key thing is to energize new blood.   The  ONLY business I see doing that is Tony See's Etsy platform.  That guy is knocking out of the park.  Please go go check out his Facebook group.   All young people making great stuff and having a blast.   Selling Ritza thread and Angelus is not  going to do it.   There needs to be fundamental change to the approach with this art form if it is going to survive.

  9. Posted · Report reply

    17 minutes ago, Rhale said:

     As far as teaching younger beginners, I enjoy showing anyone that is interested in fact I have done several tooling classes at a Tandys free of charge, I don’t charge anyone and don’t get paid to do it , I believe leathercraft can be a life long hobby as I have been fortunate enough to have enjoyed it for close to 60 years.

    Thanks man...that's exactly what is needed.  kudos to you

  11. Posted · Edited by cseeger · Report reply

    Yes, it's a salacious title but how else can one get eyeballs diverted from the ass grabbing "Show Off" section?   Be that as it may, if you have made it this far then perhaps you're a thinking person.  Welcome.  

    The following is a rant about the state of the leather working craft industry.  In my opinion, it's an appalling state of affairs.  Please weigh in with your thoughts.

     

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

     

    The other thing that I seem to be the only one who gets this, which means the only one to think about and be pissed off about, concerned about it, would like to do something about it. 

    And that my fellow leatherwokring compadres is that our industry is the red headed step child of all the crafts and it's shrinking .

    It pains me that the craft I love so much is represented by a company as clueless and as incompetent as Tandy is. I'm specifically referring to their abdication of responsibility as the defacto industry leader. Self interest alone should be motivation enough to take a leadership position in our micro market. But honestly, in the fourteen years I've been working with leather, I cannot think of one single innovative anything that has come out of the Tandy camp. They are the industry leader, but they do nothing to advance the craft. Just the same old boring crap, frozen in time....1964.
    By my estimates, our micro craft market here in the US is around $300M year in revenue. That includes all the retailers and the micro tanneries who cater to us and all the handmade goods we make and some of us sell.  


    You may not know this since Tandy looms large in our minds as the largest retailer in our micro industry, but Tandy is a tiny company at $83M in revenue. To put that in perspective, the average new car dealership in the United States does about $40M in sales per year. A car lot, for Pete's sakes, is half the size of Tandy. Wrap your mind around that for a moment.

    In contrast, The total US crafting industry which we are a part of is...drum roll... a whopping $50 BILLION industry. F I F T Y B I L L I O N U N I T E D S T A T E S D O L L A R S. Are you familiar with the Scrapbooking craft, that frivolous fluffy stationary craft that glues various items to stationary to decorate scrapbooks? That goofy craft is a $1.5 Billion market and that is down from its height of $2.5 Billion a decade ago. But leathercraft can only command $250M? 


    Our craft is a useful craft. We actually make stuff that is useful and has purpose, and yet we weigh in at just one sixth the size of a useless, whimsical craft like Scrapbooking? How in the hell is that even remotely possible? And while the US crafting industry is growing and forecasted to continue growing, leathercraft is forecasted to contract 5-10% in the mid- term. 

     

    Who, I ask you, is minding the ship here?

     

     

  15. Posted · Edited by cseeger · Report reply

    1 hour ago, toxo said:

    I see your point and for me Sheridan has run it's course also. I'd love to see the same principles applied to more modern designs But you can't stop a guy exploring what's in him, no matter what he does it's all been done before. Albob made the thing for someone else and he got some learning from it and some pride and deservedly so. You could have said it differently.

    Nothing against Albob or what he made or even to show it off.  I'm making the broader point that this art form is dominated by old guard practitioners who value technique over design and that thinking is taking the art form nowhere, killing it in fact.  But I will say this, there is one person who is single handedly pushing it forward -- Tony See -- but sadly even he doesn't get it.  

  17. Posted · Edited by cseeger · Report reply

    3 hours ago, motocouture said:

    Thanks for sharing this detail! Abas Hardware also stock (occasionally) the hardware; I’ve used it on a similar ‘Kelly’ clutch, and it worked nicely, good quality. 

    https://abasfashionaccessories.com/collections/closures/products/kit-hb 

    Thanks for the source,  That set is a lot closer to the real hardware than what Ohio Bag sells.  Yours uses those tiny rivets as Hermes does whereas Ohio Bag uses screws and has fake rivet dents in the front.  Very cool, thanks.

  19. Posted · Report reply

    On 6/17/2019 at 11:06 PM, Chain said:

    Best patterns out there !!!

    Yep and the best accompanying videos too.  

    God I wish he was around back when I started out.  Back then we didn't even have paper. You had to "visualize, memorize, and vocalize by saying goofy sing song phrases like One Two apply the glue.  Three four apply some more. Five six dry then stick.  Seven eight, now cut it straight.  Nine ten...I forget what that one was.  Oh remember, Nine ten don't throw your cigarette butts in the trash bin.  We said it but nobody followed that one.

  20. Posted · Report reply

    Ever read "Tobacco Road" by  Erskine Caldwell?.  It's set in the very rural Applachia circa 1932, sort of a precursor to the" Grapes of Wrath".  The way you describe your upbringing reminds me of that novel and how for fun the kids would throw rocks against the side of their house.  It such a surreal scenario you don't know whether to laugh or be empathetically depressed.  That said, there's something to be said for not knowing what you don't know.   I mean you can't long for that which you haven't experienced.  .  Ya know what?  That's bollucks.   Provenciality is a waste of life and its only good because its familiar.   Well, for old folks it doesn't matter much, but for kids;...you can't grow kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown.  From the sound of it, you know this quite well.

  22. Posted · Edited by cseeger · Report reply

    1 hour ago, mikesc said:

    Come from "farming stock" Irish ( Eire ) you have to deal with the weather, and all the usual small farm stuff..make anyone pragmatic, no sense shouting at the rain when you are lambing outside in winter..I was even military for a while ( RAF ) like my Dad before me ( but he signed up as a youth and stayed in 'til he retired ).."back in the day" the RAF ( and maybe the Army and Navy did it too ) would pay for your university courses, or pay you some "pocket money" while you studied ( still had to do a lot of jobs to pay my way in studies, but any little helps ) if you signed on for a short time with them..Visit foreign parts, jump out of perfectly good aircraft with assorted weaponry, even did marching in lines and what later became known as "yomping" around various bits of Wales and the wilder bits of the UK..Farmers kids ( grew up either on the farm in Eire or RAF bases  around the world, "RAF brat" ) make good military, we can ( most of us ) shoot more accurately than the average recruit, and put up with the weather and the dirt and crap, even put up with Drill sergeants and occasionally idiot chinless pointy head senior officers..plus , it used to pay well..I would not be in favour of any draft or compulsoryness* ( France is introducing compulsory "national service again at 16, IMO huge mistake..any military do not need kids who do not want to be there ) ..Even a short time in the military IME makes you look at life differently..makes you look at civilians differently too..friends in various police services say the same..

    What the civilians think are really important "life and death" things..are not..funny, my wife says I'm "pragmatic " too, until, like all Irish, someone steps on my toes, or threatens my family..or does something that I think is really unjust or plain wrong..

    *compulsoryness..may not be an actual word.. :)

     

    topic drift..how did we get here from handbags..ah yeah..rich people and making things that they want, and people's priorities.

     

    Oh we'll come back around to leather working eventually.

    I spent a year and half in Dublin and absolutely loved it.  Well, Ireland itself isn't anything to write home about.  If you seen one idyllic farm outlined with an ancient rock wall,  framed in green and dotted with puffs of brilliant white wool from distant scattered sheep,  you've seen them all.  What  makes Ireland great are the Irish.  Just the loveliest people.  Stubborn sonsofbitches but lovely nonetheless.  And singers, my god what beautiful voices.  I'm a singing fool myself and make karaoke covers on YouTube, been in bands back in the day, so I speak from some authority on that topic.  

    Back to the stubborn part.  The gig I was on was negotiating a very complicated joint venture with the Bank of Ireland as it turns out.  There was an article in the paper about an international deal that went south  and it was a pretty big news event because had it worked out it was going bring a lot of jobs to Ireland.   One of the deal guys from the foreign firm said " "Negotiating with the < Irish> is like pushing water uphill with a rake."   It certainly felt like that at times.  But after 5 pm, the ties came off and the pints flowed and we were best of friends.   I was the finance guy and hence worked with the numbers and at every opportunity I would get my Irish counterparts to say "third".  You know why.

    I had to go to Ireland to discover the deep kinship that exists between the US and Ireland.  Once there I learned that one in four Americans claim Irish ancestry.  I was shocked to discover that Dubliners celebrate the Fourth of July,....fireworks, the whole deal. I've traveled all over the world.  There is no other country that celebrates the 4th that I'm aware of (Google Brain either, just looked it up).   Every Irish person I met had either 1) been to NYC, 2) had a trip planned to NYC, or 3) had relatives living in NYC.  A guy on our team, a born and raised American, applied for and received an Irish Passport and citizenship under the long standing statute that anyone who could prove a grandparent was an Irish Citizen was automatically granted citizenship themselves, and their spouse....which also meant he had a EU Passport and the right  live and work anywhere in the EU.  Lucky Bastard.  With a last name of Caffrey, he was shoe in. Me?  All German, which is fine, but damn to get that Irish deal, geez...

    One last Irish story.  A local gal was on my team and she talked about growing up poor in rural Ireland. Some little dinky boring village.  They didn't even have a TV (that part sounded like hype, but anyway) or maybe it was one channel.  She  described their social situation as so boring that it could almost cause illness,   To counter this and just for the entertainment of it, her family would hangout at the Train Station on Friday evenings and target one traveler.  They did this for years, she said, so it was not difficult to pick out just the right person by the way they dressed and conducted themselves.  They were after a young traveling foreigner, a budget traveler, an adventurer.  Once targeted they swooped in on him (always a him) and sort of demanded that he spend the weekend with them free of charge.  They never went home empty handed,   And once home they would quiz him  about the goings on the world and pick his brain dry over the course of the weekend.   She said she got the BEST education from years of those experiences.   Even if exaggerated, that's a helluva story.

  23. Posted · Report reply

    3 minutes ago, mikesc said:

    Indeed, but..I'm very happy that the "luxury market " exists..keeps me in groceries and beer etc..means I don't have to tend to sheep and cows ( although I have, and like them ) and be a hand to mouth existence farmer like my ancestors..Same applies to the fetish or fashion, or art, music etc businesses..without people with varying degrees of "spare money" and their "wants" / "desires" and us supplying them with what we make or sell or design or create or all of those things put together..many of us would not have the lives that we do..

    It's hard to argue with pragmatism.  It's like that quote from the movie Platoon where Charlie Sheen (Chris) is explaining why he volunteered to join the Army and even requested Infantry Duty.  "I figured why should all the poor guys get drafted and the rich boys get deferrals?  Didn't seem right to me."  And Ketih David (King) replies "Shit, you gotta be rich to think like that."

  25. Posted · Report reply

    17 minutes ago, Wayne0820 said:

    Good job, it looks great!

    It always takes a lot of time to find a proper hardware with good quality. I bought 3 hardware kits for Kelly or Birkin from Taobao (a China website), where you may find everything. The quality of the hardware is good to me. It comes up with several tiny rivets, rather than screws, to install the hardware. 

    https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.90.37b5613bfvAgDO&id=584199496458&ns=1&abbucket=16#detail

    That site looks great and on its way to being awesome if I could figure out how to translate it to English.  Do you know how?  Usually there's a button to "Translate this page"

×
×
  • Create New...