Nuttish

Are the strap punches round or English?

Glad you were able to find plutonium for your Flux Capacitor.

You only need a 1/2" Jacobs chuck. for any of these solutions. You can get them from Harbor Freight for $9. If you want to go slower than 3400 RPM, you'll need another motor or to build a mechanical speed control like I did — it is not practical to change the speed of a capacitor start motor. I'm not even sure it's possible. You can get good-enough benchtop lathes from Harbor Freight for $200. The speeds are perfect. http://www.harborfreight.com/5-speed-bench-top-wood-lathe-65345.html There are variable speed fractional horsepower bench buffers with long arbors on Amazon for less than $200. I think they have 5/8" arbors, but you can also get 5/8" Jacobs chucks. You can get cheapish VFDs for 3 phase grinders if that's what you have.

Inkscape is unfortunately difficult to use for the patternmaking task of adding stitch marks with an appropriate allowance that you can very very easily manipulate. I could give a tutorial for making these operations trivially easy in Illustrator, but that's not what you asked for. If you want to take a run at Illustrator, I'd be up for doing a free basic group lesson for people from the site covering basic patternmaking. You can get a month of Illustrator and other useful Adobe apps for $20. No, I don't get paid for shilling for Adobe.

PM me if you have your art ready.

Update: They're appallingly made and of dubious safety. The machine smokes and an exposed part of the wiring harness started melting and turning black. The platen is tiny and not flat. The ram twists under the least pressure. All in all, the machine was incapable of making an acceptable impression with 1/2"x1" and smaller dies. The depth stop is flimsy and inadequate. The foil roller mechanism doesn't feed or take up uniformly. ... or even straight. There are file marks on the press body and base and each and every component is of noticeably poor quality. And the instructions are incomprehensible. Definitely not worth $200. Or $1. Avoid.

For what it's worth, Shellie and John Culliton both express great interest in helping small outfits grow. As far as I'm aware, Horween and Wickett & Craig are the only American tanneries that will sell someone 1 side. That's remarkable considering Horween supplies so many manufactures of diverse products, from Alden of New England, to Wilson. And honestly, both tanneries have very good prices for very good products. Shellie is the small business rep. She's not always in the tannery, but is, in my experience, extremely helpful when I get hold of her. Yes, you'll probably get quicker service if you're a buyer for a larger outfit, but you won't get better service. Horween definitely wants to sell small outfits leather and see it's stuff out in the wild. You just have to adjust your expectations a little.

It helps me greatly to slow things down. My 1750 rpm 3/4 hp motor is running 2:1 to an arbor with those Italian felt burnishing wheels from Campbell Randall, so it's about 875 rpm. Works well enough. This English bridle took maybe 3 minutes, though it's tiny. Sand straight, bevel, 400 grit belt to dress it up, saddle soap foam burnish, 400 grit, saddle soap foam burnish, 400 grit then 600 grit, super secret wax mixture.

it's cool but you need to have your brand name somewhere on the piece, even if it's on the inside.

See if they'll send you pics. Some stuff is really crummy except for small pieces. Some of the CXL sides are nearly as good as firsts. With other tannages, you have to know what Horween intended in the first place — Dublin is "rustic" and even firsts have spots and drawn grain, which is absolutely gorgeous sometimes. Let us know how your order goes.

I hate obvious branding and agree on concealing it. But you have to mark your pieces somehow, especially since they're consistent with the EDC ethic — those people put up pictures on Instagram, forums, and show their pieces to anyone who will look. I don't see any identify branding on your site at all. That's a grave oversight. You're launching a fashion accessories brand! The typesetting for your brand name in the header is fine, but you've got to come up with a simple visual branding element that is distinctive and interesting to look at. People expect it. I looked at some of your pieces. Your wallets and belts totally lend themselves to concealed branding like hot foil stamping the flesh side of interiors! It would make a strong statement that your work is about materials, construction, and simple functional design, not branding.

When I'm putting the first straight edge on to pull straps, I clamp a 72" machinist rule over the leather onto my bench with some woodworking clamps. Works great. I don't think you'll get any stretching if you do something like that and cut it with a rotary cutter on something pretty darn flat like a piece of MDF.

Sort of. There are ways to work with it safely. 1. Spray it with urethane so it doesn't oxidize to white dust, which is dangerous. Respray when you've whacked holes in it. 2. Wear nitrile gloves or wash your hands immediately. 3. Wash and dry your irons and punches often. They can take it. You're sharpening them frequently anyway. 4. Keep it in a shallow tupperware and handle that, not the lead itself.

Honestly it's worth a trip to Chicago of this is your business. You need to see what tannages are on the shelf in which weights and be able to ask shellie and John more questions than they'll answer on email. They occasionally have VERY special overages as well as colors of tannages you don't have chips of. They'll also let you use their deep calipers. The temper of different weights and colors of the same tannages are different.

I wouldn't use sandpaper on thin wood. The paper will invariably bulge and cause you to round over corners. I take it from your extreme perfectionism that you wouldn't want that. Yes, I'm talking about fingernail files. They're tremendously useful tools for all kinds of things.

What's wrong with that iron? Even Blanchards have machining marks on them. I narrowed the tines on an Osborne by lapping the sides on a piece of emery paper on glass so I can definitely say that at least modern Osbornes are not too hard to work with. You can sharpen them with progressively finer grit steel nail files. Cheaper than a set of jewelers files.

This works on the grain of some kinds of leather and the flesh side of everything:

Yes, I did it yesterday. I pick up all my orders. It's a great benefit to be able to pick sides, as well. Totally true. Erin at Maverick will even text you pics of sides. They're sometimes as good or better than sides on the shelf at the tannery!

Fashion and clothing are quite different than some of the types of tangible goods being discussed here. They're generally not copyrightable. Go to Barney's or Neiman's and closely study a few high end handbags. Then go over to a mid level department store and see some of the same design elements in less expensive bags. At the end of the day, 99% of the fashion industry relies on cribbing designs from fashion houses at the top of the food chain. It takes a year or more for the basics of off the rack designs from major international fashion shows to trickle down, but they do.

That's the Korean version of the Korean version Campbell Randall sells. They are suitable for use with certain edge paints. I haven't found that Angelus acrylic works with a creaser and spirit lamp, but there is an Italian paint used by high end bag makers you can find mentioned in other threads discussing this tool.

Those are likely burnished with heat and painted. I hope others will chime in with suggestions on suitable paints. You can do it with a clean burning spirit lamp and a creaser, but the technique is best done with a European style electric iron like those available from Campbell Randall - http://www.campbell-randall.com/shop/index.php?route=product/product&path=74_110&product_id=14436

So you can practice for the time being, you might consider sacrificing a fork to make a rudimentary (and useful!) pricking iron that can make marks approximate the same size as you'll get from the Osborne and Blanchard pricking wheels I've seen. Have a look at the points of a proper European pricking iron and file the tines to the same approximate angle, making sure to thin then on both sides and flatten the ends a hair so you don't puncture your leather. Then bend the forks inward until you get the approximate number of stitches per inch you wish. You'll have a narrow iron, but it will be perfectly serviceable for your purposes. You don't really need to whack thin and soft leather that hard — anything like a short cutoff of 1x2 will be fine. Good luck!

My Kingsley died and I need another stamper. Has anyone taken the plunge and gotten one of the el cheapo Chinese hot foil stampers on eBay? $209 delivered from California in 2 days with a 2 year warranty and two rolls of (I'm dead certain crummy) foil. Sort of hard to pass up considering how expensive and hit or miss used American machines are. Thoughts?

Starrett 1010 pocket thickness gage. <$50 on eBay. The Mitutoyo 7803 is nearly identical and priced similarly. These are machinists' tools that measure in thousandths, so use the table from Stohlman's Insider's Guide to Leathercrafting.

You're going along saying "yay me this stuff will burnish up just fine" And then