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I haven't had the greatest luck with drilling well either, but I use a drill press with a fence and just try to make sure everything is getting pushed up against it. For curved edges, I turned a small cylinder that sits in the center hole of the drill press table and use that as more of a single point fence, if that makes sense.

I have a TON of 9"x13" chipboard (the pressed together cardboard stuff, not the wood product) left over from a previous business that I use for my patterns. I typically draw them out on my PC in one of a couple programs - Inkscape is great and free - and then print them out, double sticky them to the chipboard sheets and cut them out there. Once I have the patterns done, I use a combination of chipboard to simulate thicker leathers and some hideous upholstery fabric to make test runs from my patterns. It's not perfect, but you can punch and sew it well enough to at least make sure everything will fit together right when you're done without wasting any leather. The chipboard takes some getting used to so that the folds and bends somewhat mimic the way leather moves.

Thanks for the reminder! I haven't used it much yet, as I'm retrofitting a section of my shop to become a permanent leatherworking area. I did take it out and mess with it a bit, and have a few first impressions: It absolutely will need to be bolted down to something. This wasn't a surprise by any means, and I'm building in some quick attach points on my workbench to be able to set up various tools that need to be secured like this. The blade is MUCH thicker than I expected. It came pretty sharp. I ran a 1 1/4" strap through it to skive the end for a buckle and it cut well enough, but before I start really using it I'll be doing some work on it. The variable depth seems like it will be pretty nice for tapering ends. I have not tried skiving any of the wider leather that I had originally bought it for. It will need to be bolted down and have some blade work done before it's worth giving that a shot. I will definitely write something up once I've had a chance to mess with it more - most likely in a couple months.

That's kind of what I was thinking. I spend more time doing hand tool woodworking than I do leather at this point, so I figured I could probably tune the blade a bit and completely regrind it if I need to.

I ended up caving and buying one, so I will figure out what it can and can't do and put up a post about it in a while. I figured that even if it doesn't work so well for the larger pieces it looks like it should do a really nice job on straps which would still be a huge help for me.

That's what I was afraid of. Thanks for the advice!

I've been trying to find some videos of the Tandy Deluxe model and haven't been having much luck. I have a couple questions as well if anyone has experience on one of these. I would like to be able to split leather down to around the 2oz range for use in wallets. Typically the largest pieces would be maybe 4" wide and 8" long. I have a lot of 4-6 oz leather that I would like to split down to 2 oz or so. Does anyone know if the tandy machine is capable of making that sort of cut reasonably well, or do I need to be looking at something a little higher end? Also, how sturdy is the tandy model? I found some videos of the weaver heritage which seems to be at least vaguely similar in design and it seems to be a very solid tool.

One thing we've been seeing in our other business lately is people waiting for just over a year after the purchase then sending messages saying they never got the item. In that business, we sell enough items and a lot of them are straight ordered off the site without any real communication, so we don't always know their names offhand. At some point the tracking info goes away, so it looks like the package never even got sent. They're hoping you just go back and search for their name and don't notice that it is from a year and two weeks ago instead of just two weeks and refund or re-send the items. It's been tried on us a couple times, but luckily we caught the original message dates every time.