sepharad

Fascinating, I started out with awl, but went to irons, but only after identifying quality ones. I love my peers at tandy, but one look at their irons convinced to spend more and accept only a really high quality tool. I bought from goodsjapan and am glad I spent the money. The stitches are fine, even, and I don't use "rope", just imported unwaxed linen. I make my own wax. The irons holes are so tight I frequently have to use pliers. My hats off to the awl-masters, but my hands and eyes appreciate the irons results.

Tandy's business model is based on entry level crafts. There is some expansion into higher level leatherworker items, like their new stitching irons. This is risky for them, if they increase the quality and no one buys, because it's not cheap, they go bust. As studio-n noted, and I cannot emphasize strongly enough, the price is not going up, the dollar is going DOWN. My childhood gasoline of 35 cents is now $3.75. We cannot pay a living wage and compete on price, so manufacturing goes overseas. We are seeing the trend of the future, Everything manufactured and shipped will continue upward along with petroleum and the decline in our currency. Look at the price of your leather overseas. I wanted top quality irons and paid 4x the craft quality price of tandy. The plastic spool cover for my sears craftsman weedwhacker is $50. We are like the frog in a pan of slowly heating water and are about to be cooked. This IS our new American reality. We're bankrupt.

My local Tandy dealer has proven quite helpful. She agreed with my assessment of steps 13 and 14 and sent a note to the designer. During these steps the following appears to occur: in step 13 the drawing is trying to indicate riveting of 2 gussets (each assembled in step 11, from 3 pieces) to each other, flesh to flesh, then being riveted to one edge of the "front flap" and "front". Step 14 a through c then shows tying the front flap, the gussets and front together and stitching the 2 gussets together. What it fails to show adequately, but by careful examination "implies" in the side illustration, is that you would insert a "pocket" between the two gussets before stitching. While called a "pocket", in this case it appears to become an internal divider. The second matching piece, another "pocket" is tied on externally on the back and becomes an actual pocket. Essentially, all of the pieces must be riveted then tied together in 4 layers, BEFORE stitching. This is not shown, unfortunately, until AFTER doing so in the instructions. The internal divider is all but invisible in the illustrations. An exploded diagram would have made a huge difference. As to the leather, others have had good luck. My top grain is lifting wherever the leather is being stressed by stitching. After I learn to resize photos in picasa I will attach some

The design is great. The leather is miserable and my top grain is lifting like alligator skin, along stitch stress points. The instructions are miserable after step 12 and I am having to tear it apart to reassemble. Just a few extra, exploded images could do a lot to fix this. There may be an online video in the future by the designer. Typical Tandy giant stitch holes, good for beginner. Basically, buy it, trace the pattern pieces and use good leather, replace the stitching holes with smaller spacing using an iron, replace the giant thread with something quality like Barbour linen or Hungarian linen from Campbell machine. This is a really Nice design and the fellow who designed it did good job. He needed to give it to 2 or three people to see where they could not follow his directions to iron that part out.

We'll the disappointment continues. After taking the pieces to tandy, where the steps were "clarified" I resumed assembly, only to find that two flap pieces also needed inclusion. This is not clear in these really awful "instructions". Also, my milled leather looked great after dyeing, put now looks like crap after stitching. The top grain has crinkled up along all the stitching areas. I will be returning the kit and see what tandy proposes. I am taking photos of the whole process and will still post them.

I am stuck at exactly the same place on this pattern. I actually think I understand what the instructions are asking me to do...but it make NO sense to me. I will spin by tandy and ask and will take a few photos and post them. This is the most bizarre turn I have ever seen in an instruction set.

Are you speaking of asian style archery? If so there is a glove which replaces the use of a thumb ring. http://www.archerytorque.com/THUMB-SHOOTING-GLOVE I may buy one myself to see ghow it works and is built.

Nice lacing, especially about the pouch flap, Good basketweave depth. Thankyou for sharing your dye source.Is the left hip forward or right hip backward arrow orientation.

I think any archer would be proud to wear your work. Nice job.

Nice work. You can line up in advance by using registration marks and then counting and making stitches that parallel. What would you have done to precondition before working the leather if you had it to do over again? I have had cracking with tooling/veg leather as well.

I built a Horizontal Courier bag. The leather was quite good veg tan, not thin or stiff. stitching is wide. The instructions are quite good. What is missing, is a pattern. Tandy does not include one, nor can you buy just a pattern. Also, while it goes together quite well, there are some oddities of design, I believe primarily to use smaller, a more packageable product. The body of the bag is made of 4 short panels instead of 2 longer ones. While I would prefer to build my own from scratch, like many people I am not comfortable with laying out my own pattern. There is a sad shortage of full sized patterns on the market. I have stolmans volume one and am enjoying it. Currently I am seeking decent full sized patterns for Central asian, mongol, tatar/turkish quivers. Sepharad