Nuttish

I'm on an old Epilog 30 watt. After messing around with this enough it's become clear that there's no point in sharing settings. What matters are strategies. Every single tannage will be different. Horween Dublin cuts far more easily than Chromexcel, which sometimes cuts the same as Legacy depending on where on the side the piece came from. It's all highly variable. The strategy that almost always works is cutting through the grain and only a small amount of flesh. The flesh is where we run into trouble as the beam pattern hits more and more of the top edges of the grain as it goes deeper and deeper. This has worked very well. I'm finishing my edges, so the trivial imprecision of hand cutting doesn't matter for me any more than it matters for anyone else. I can also make shallow diagonal stitching marks as I would with a pricking iron that get exposed when I skive my edges before construction. I don't think I could do any of this with a die.

Ok then. If you want a new pricking iron, you've got Osborne, Vergez Blanchard, Dixon's, maybe Craft Sha, and poor quality Chinese or Korean stuff. If you want a chisel, you've got the options everyone else told you about. Pricking irons and chisels are different tools. Have fun.

That looks like greasy retanned leather to me. It might also just be waxed and burnished, but that's not a cost-effective production process, so I expect it came from the tannery that way.

That's quite nice. I've been wanting to build a stitching pony. You know what the next question is, right? Would you please post your drawings? :-)

I'm testing out some paring knives I made out of D2 and CPM S30V. Is anyone else here making their own tools?

Osborne punches are the standard in multiple industries. They're made out of nice steel, well machined, and take a nice edge. That style of skiver is in my opinion mostly useless. You'll spend more time replacing blades than doing good work, which will be hard to manage anyhow. Picking skiving tools is highly personal and depends on/informs your workflow and style quite a bit. I'd recommend spending the money and getting a tool that's made out of good quality blade steel, whether you choose an American or French paring knife or use a round knife.

Those aren't pricking irons. They're punches. They also look sort of shitty. A pricking iron barely marks the surface; you then open your hole with a diamond saddler's or harnessmaker's awl. Actual pricking irons are nearly unknown to American leatherwork anymore so they're difficult to find over here. They're the standard for European work. The contemporary American equivalent would be an overstitching wheel. However, you can easily find reasonably priced vintage Osborne and Gomph pricking wheels, which would lay tiny diagonal marks without piercing the grain like a pricking iron. Look at Bruce Johnson's site. He has a lot of very nice old tools for good prices. Osborne is the only US manufacturer of actual pricking irons. https://www.osbornel...ils.php?pid=424 . Otherwise you're spending quite a lot to get a European tool. 6 tpi may be very wide for a wallet depending on the thread you use. What style of work do you intended to do? If you like, I can post some pics comparing stitch lengths of 6-12 tpi with various threads (including Tiger - it really doesn't look like traditional linen thread at all) and showing what some of these tools look like next Wednesday when I get back from a trip. Update: Ok 3 layers of 6/7. So if you're making Costanzas I would recommend sticking with 6 tpi.

Size 1, 2, and 3 John James needles for the US market are all 1.02mm diameter. 4 is 0.86mm. The Tiger thread people are selling on Etsy are in ~ 1mm and .8mm. A JJ #1/2/3 or Osborne #18 would be just fine. You say size 2 is small? What are the dimensions marked on the envelope? Bigger needles than that are just a pain in the butt and require a bigger and more visible stitching hole. Why do you want Tiger thread? It's braided and relatively easy to stitch through and snag. I don't understand what people like about it. There are tons and tons of very high quality and reasonably priced threads out there. Royalwood sells the entire range of (rebranded) Caldwell linen colors in 3 + plies. There are a few other outfits that sell their own color ranges in 3 + ply threads. You can also dye white thread with a good quality reactive dye. I got a cone of 4 ply white Barbour Irish linen at I Sach's in Chicago for something like $35. I've been pulling off dozens of yards at a time to dye and I'm sure the cone will still last this hand sewer until the heat death of the universe.

I have a piece like that. You can saddle stitch the whole thing with straight needles. One side is easy to conceptualize, right? The other is not much different once you understand that you will always be stitching away from the closed space. It's just a matter of switching hand priority.

All is possible. Ideally you want a butt stitch. It's difficult to do nicely and will pucker to some degree but it's less visible than a cross stitch. A cross stitch would be an easier to execute and perfectly suitable alternative, though not as strong as a butt (saddle) stitch. You will usually see them in contrasting thread on hipster goods. PM me and I will show you an example of one on an appallingly overpriced $100 wallet. You can also try a baseball stitch. In other words, you may not need to spend more money. The seam on decent quality jeans is a flat fell seam. Theoretically you could try one, but they're hard to do by hand (impossible at the weight leather you're proposing) and aren't suitable for high stress seams because all the tension is on one thread. A blanket stitch is for edge binding fabric or fixing layers of leather. It is therefore not suitable for joining butt edges.

I find the lack of feedback and accuracy using a ruler unacceptable. Even a clear ruler obscures the edge. It's also far too easy to make irreparable errors if the straightedge slips. When I rarely use a ruler and rotary cutter on unfinished vegetable tanned leather, I use a heavy steel carpenter's straightedge that I glued latex strips to. They have far better grip than cork. You can get them as large rubber bands for artists's drafting clipboards at Blick. Latex will still slip on waxy or fatty tannages. Now I lay lines out with a sharp awl and a heavy steel straightedge and freehand a very sharp round knife. I just find it easier to get better cuts this way. You can roll in and out of your cuts to avoid distorting the leather and getting bowed ends and it's easier to nibble in to correct those inevitable little deviations from the line or make them less obvious by stretching the error over a longer distance. Stand over your work so you can both get the appropriate mount of blade into the leather and cutting surface and make sure your knife is straight. Unlike the rotary cutter, which doesn't always make it easy to tell whether you've made a clean vertical cut in one pass, you get useful feedback from the round knife telling you you're doing well. YMMV.

I'll just put this here - I'm grateful for this resource if it's accurate - it translates the odd French numbering system for hand sewing linen thread to Tex, which means we ought to be able to find appropriate threads MUCH more easily from a whole new range of suppliers. http://www.sovefac.com/lin.htm

Thanks much Gernot. Unfortunately, they apparently don't know how to deliver to the US. If I could find someone in Paris who would be willing to buy me thread from Sajou, I'd be able to save quite a lot on shipping, even with duty. In any event, I can't even find Campbell's website. It's really weird that Marchand Medieval is the only place I can find that sells Campbell's in consumer quantities. Oh well. I guess they don't want my money.

Yes, 4/5 for a lined gentleman's belt perhaps. I've got no idea where you're going to be able to buy anything that's not garbage by the foot. That's not how leather's sold. Tooling leather is unfinished vegetable tanned leather that will take dye, burnish, tool, crease, etc. etc. It's not retanned, so you can do whatever you want to it. Since vegetable tanned leather comes in a ton of finishes from a ton of tanneries, I recommended something basic that you can finish however you wish and that would serve you well even for "production" pieces. In other words, "veg tan" isn't a single kind of leather - it's a process that can yield shitloads of different kinds of products. I just skimmed through that video. Don't ever hold a round knife like that unless you want to dye your leather from a gash in your wrist. I winced.

Also, the design is deceptively un-simple. Drawing that pattern will be a fun exercise. Add a 1/2" Pippin punch to your shopping basket.

That Tandy economy shoulder will have a lot of flaws to work around and may not be big enough for what you need. The Tanner envelope is one piece of leather if I recall correctly. Honestly, for what it's going to cost to make and the practice it will take to make it well enough, just call Tanner up on the fone and ask them to make you one in a bigger size. Lots of people draw their patterns in Adobe Illustrator so they can resize anything very easily. I suspect a bunch of Portland hipsters will be able to do you right if you ask nicely and give them some mustache wax. Damn that would be lovely in 6/7 English bridle.

Where did you get the image? If it's your wallet, please take a picture in better light both straight on and from an angle. If that's laser engraved, I bet it will smell like burnt skunks for all eternity.

The cloth might traditionally be sewed or glued under a rolled edge for each slot. You don't need to stitch anything to the leather to line the slots you're showing. You can glue in a silk or nylon taffeta liner. Make an accordion by folding your taffeta to the depths you need to hold your cards (horizontal or vertical). Lightly press to hold your folds. Machine stitch the top of each fold. You want them to hold flat to the back of the leather when you glue up. Machine stitch up both sides to hold your folds in place before you glue up. Fold the top of the top and bottom slots over 1/4" and stitch them in the same manner as the other folds to hide the raw edge before gluing so that the taffeta doesn't unravel anywhere visible. Glue your construction onto the back of your slotted piece by covering the flesh side with Barges and then gluing your accordion section by section to the spaces between your slots and then down the sides adjacent to your slots. The piece you're showing will give you a ton of gluing area to make sure your slot liners don't move. Look at some men's and women's wallets at Neiman's, Sak's, Barney's, etc. to see how they're constructing them. Luxury pieces may be constructed with the taffeta or other liner covering some kind of structure like stiff thin leather (or cardboard).

2/3 may be a little light for an unlined single slot wallet like that guy's making. Anyhow, you can get 2/3 vegetable tanned tooling leather sides at Tandy. They're more expensive than nicer pieces from Horween. Tandy's economy tooling shoulders in 4/5 are actually pretty nice. If you're making small pieces for practice, you'll get fair bang for your buck. Hermann Oak sells nicer tooling sides in lighter weights. They have minimums if you order directly from the tannery. Check for a distributor to buy by the side. My recommendation: Wickett & Craig has very nice and very reasonably priced tooling leather and they'll both split to whatever weight you want and (I believe) sell you a single side. That might actually be your most cost effective choice for what you get: around $180 for a side.

Chromexcel and another retanned Horween tannage laser cut just fine once I found the appropriate settings and learned how to handle the burnt hair smell.

I'm finding that to be true for Chromexcel and a new Horween tannage that's a retanned veg vs. chrome. I've gotten clean cuts without substantial charring by drawing unintuitive vectors because of the kerf of the cut on our Epilog. It would be super nice to be able to laser cut for production but my pieces do nonetheless stink and I'm not launching a luxury goods line that smells like burnt hair.

Can you share what machine and settings you use for which leather? My working area is 24x12. The Epilog Mini 24 costs about $15,000. I only use it for small pieces so far.

I've got a Epilog 30W and am working on settings to cut 6 oz Chromexcel. Very difficult stuff to cut so far. What settings are you guys using on the Trotec?

Ahh. Moms are a great resource. Mine doesn't have a Kelly or Birkin :-) Knowing of the Eclaire mark helped me find eBay, so thanks much for the info. Older Hermes Kelly and Louis Vuitton handbag zippers were apparently marked Eclaire. LV also used Talon. Apparently Eclaire is still around and offers a huge array of colors. http://www.eclair-prym.eu/uploads/pdf/EP-colourcard.pdf I sincerely doubt I can purchase in great enough quantities for Eclaire to even talk to me but I believe Talon sells to consumers. Thanks for the info, Veedub.

Anyone know which brands of zippers luxury handbag makers like Hermes, LV, Gucci, Tods, Celine, etc. use on their pieces? I'm also looking for a source of custom pulls. Thanks in advance.