fishguy

Another point when doing faces is that the old cliche "Less is more" really counts. Keep the features, especially eyes, loose and don't feel that you have to reproduce every wrinkle and fold. You should be able to do a lot just with embossing tools and no cutting. The secret to representing people's faces is study and practice. Actually as humans we face (har har) a tougher chanllenge with doing faces than almost anything else. This is because we are programmed to recognize not only individuals from their facial features, but all sorts of subtle nuances of expression, etc. We are all facial experts from birth. Thus, if anyting at all is wrong on the face it will really stand out and look weird. If you did a face and a flower of equal quality and representational accuracy, the flower could look perfect to you, but the face would look weird. This is also part of the reason why it is good to stay loose when doing faces and features, an overwrought attempt at photo-realisim is much less pleasing than an loose or even cartoony face.

As long as your wife loves them, they are a success. You might want to add another layer of leather to the soles as the deer leather will probably wear through pretty quickly.

John Waterer, from Great Britan, has done a lot of scholarly type work on the history of leathercraft. His site is: http://www.museumofleathercraft.org/ He has also written a number of classical books on the history of leathercraft. I do not think anyone has written a survey of leather tooling styles in the U.S., here's your chance.

You could also join multiple pieces of leather together. If you handle the design cleverly you can probably hide the join fairly well. I have seen some seriously long straps at the leather stores I go to so I do think there are probably some that may be long enough for you out there. If you are going to join the leather a harness splice would be a good candidate. Skive the ends of both pieces down so when placed together they transition smoothly and glue together . Stitch along the edges to join the pieces permanently. This edge stitching would blend right in if there is stitching all along the edges (as in a lined belt) You could re-enforce the join by adding a concho through the two, or even a couple of rivets (probably not necessary, the stiching should be strong enough). Joining two pieces of strap leather isn't that hard, it is just how you want to work it into a design. If you wanted to go all punk on it, you could just skive it a bit so it does not make a uncomfortable bump where the join is and then rivet the hell out of that sucker.

How much should you add to the distance between the swivels to allow a good range of adjustment for a rifle sling?

So what is the best weight of leather for an unlined guitar strap?

Speaking of cigars, I think you have the makings of a pretty cool cigar case, you would have to mold a little bit more to hold the cigars without crushing them and maybe add a flap

Very interesting combination that comes off better than I thought it would. If you went more Japanese style (look at some tsuba, woodblock prints, etc) rather than Sheridan it would be even better. Though the tooling style on scabbard cover is not traditional, the leather handle wrap certainly is. A little nerdish point about Japanese scabbards. One of the reason that wood was chosen is because the sword is held in the scabbard by the copper (usually) collar. In a properly fitted scabbard no other part of the blade touches the scabbard. I have never seen pictures of a tooled leather scabbard cover (though that doesn't mean they didn't exist) but there were definetly sharkskin and tigerskin covers.

Somebody should make one of these threads a sticky, it keeps coming up

As the last two posters noted: 1. If it is going to work, it usually does it pretty quickly 2. If you aren't getting it dark enough then either a. Your vinegaroon doesn't have enough iron in it-could be because it is too new (iron has not dissolved enough yet) or too old (iron has oxidized and dropped out of solution-lots of rust present). Usually there is not a problem with not putting enough iron in when making up the solution, a good sized chunk of steel wool in a quart or so of good strong vinegar (weak vinegar could potentially be a problem too I guess), let sit for a day or two will produce really strong black b. not enough tannins in the leather. Some peices just don't seem to work well, this is possibly due to differences in the tanning procedure or just the characteristics of a particular peice of leather. Using a small scrap to test might not be a bad idea. Just dip it in and it should go black within a couple of minutes. Achieving real consistancy with vinagaroon can be tricky, that's why they invented synthetic dyes.

The Al Stohlman case making series of books, which are pretty readily available at Tandy or leather factory have quite a few examples of using plugs and two piece molds.

If it is not soaked in, use a "rubber cement pickup". It looks like an eraser and can be found at art or stationary stores

Looks nice, good job. There are roughly 2 schools of SASS holster design, the historical and the quick draw. Yours is a bit more along the quick draw road. If you get "Packing Iron" you can find out a lot more about this. Holsters in the old days were geared more towards retention, so the pistol sat down further in the holster (don't matter how fast you are on the draw if your gun is laying in the mud about a half mile back up the trail). They were also not fixed rigidly on the belt, though they may fit tightly on the belt. Some slide was necessary to adjust the fit for comfort when walking, riding a horse, etc. The quick draw type is optimized for getting the gun out of the holster and into action as quickly as possible. Thus the pistol sits in the holster fairly loosely with the trigger guard well exposed, the holster is held to the belt rigidly so there is no play (in some cases it is actually bolted to the belt via a metal plate). This gets rid of the slop and creates a rigid consistent position to draw from. If you are just going to walk up to the firing line and then shoot, retention is not such a big issue. Then there is the buscadero rig (holster threaded through a slot in the belt) vs. the standard Mexican loop (in which the belt passes through a large loop formed by the backflap of the holster, the slim Jim (tighter fitting with a relatively narrow belt loop fixed to the back of the holster), crossdraw vs. strongside, etc. etc.. You can get incredibly geeky about all this but everytime I do I get a vision of a hardbitten old buckaroo squinting at me with a mixture of disgust and disbelief.

http://www.regia.org/leatwork.htm http://www.vikingsonline.org.uk/resources/...basickit14.html

Is this the first part of a story about how he ended up with 85 stitches in his leg?

If you neutralized it with baking soda then perhaps it wasn't the vinegaroon that caused the rust. Though, baking soda, a good rinsing and letting it dry before bringing it in contact with steel sounds like a good idea. I typically do my vinegaroon dying right after cutting out the holster, so it has been neutralized and rinsed and let dry way before I go to wet molding. I also suspect that any left-over vinegar or acidity does not remain in the leather for long. Acetic acid (vinegar) is more subject to breakdown through contact with the air (oxidation) or micro-organisims than chromium salts, which are basically there forever. The actual black pigment is produced by a reaction of the dissolved iron with the tannins that are present in all veg-tanned leather.

I had visualized a curved sword like a saber. Go with Chuck, he is the man!

My advice is to listen to Chuck Water or wax hardening, or even some combination sound likely in the original. The wax would have added waterproofing and could be buffed up nicely. Modern sheath makers often have hot dip concoctions formulated from beeswax, pine resin and various other materials that they dip the finished sheaths into to make them rigid and waterproof. I would say that the scabbard was almost certainly stitched up on some sort of form, probably wood. I suspect that it may have even been stitched up on a straight form, then wetted and put onto a curved form (much easier fabrication that way) with proper boning and smoothing, no wrinkles would be visible. As for the stitches, if you make a groove on each side for the emergent loops to lie in it will smooth it out quite a bit. You will also need to use pretty thin thread. I use a butt stitch on quivers and it lies down quite nicely (of course that is more like 3-5 mm leather too). Going down the seam with a shoemaker's hammer while the leather is damp and the form is still in place would probably make them lie down pretty well too. As for the fittings, why not fit them while the leather is still damp and pliable?

It is best to have some kind of gun form. There are replica guns available of most of the popular western types. They are made of zinc alloy and run aroud $40-50, you can find them on ebay and on sites that sell replica swords, etc. I have had not problems with fit using them. Another option that I have resorted to for real custom jobs is to make a wooden model based on 3-vew drawings and measurements I found on the web. I actually enjoy doing it, but it is a bit of extra work. You can use dowels, etc. for the barrel so you don't have to carve the whole thing. It does not have to be super detailed, but you need to be sure that all the parts that stick out are present. If you buy a pattern set like those offered by Will Gormley you can be sure that it will fit, though you still might want to do a little rough stretching to open it up. This can be done with you hands, mallet handle, etc.

Pretty cool. One of the many projects I have been thinking about doing. Next you could try doing a leather version of the Roman armor, the lorica segmentata. In a book called "leather and the warrior" by John Waterer, he speculates a lot about how many forms of armor that were assumed to be steel or something else based on painting and statues were probably in many cases made of leather (hardened or otherwise). This was also true of the limnothorax that was supposed to be made of up to 20 layers of linen cloth glued together. Considering the amount of work needed just to make that much linnen cloth I suspect more than a few of them were leather.

Made my son a wallet based on the tandy moneyclip/cardholder design. He liked it very well, but after a couple of weeks the money clip hardware broke. I thought about going to magnetic, but any cards in the cardholder with magnetic strips would be toast. Does anyone know of a good source of reliable money clip hardware, or even how to make your own?

There is a sticky at the top of the "holster section"

No reason they couldn't be made out of leather too Traditional firemans helmets are also made from leather (wax hardened) if you want a really challenging project.

i usually brush it on, rather than dipping, let it sit for an hour or so, and then do a wipedown with a dilute baking soda solution. The vinagaroon (vinegar and steel wool in my case) seems to need to sit for at least 24 hours to be strong enough, a couple of days is probably better, when it starts getting a lot of rust in it it is probably time for a new batch (plus the rust gets in every nook and cranny of your project and is a pain to clean off). As long as it is a charcoal gray or blue gray it ought to darken up to a nice black when it is oiled. How dark it gets will vary with the peice of leather. The black pigment is actually produced by the reaction of the dissolved iron with the tannins in the leather. The tannins are the active component in vegetable tanning so I suppose different peices may soak up different amounts or different batches may have more or less, etc. This also means it only works on veg-tan leather. I have had some peices that looked as if I had painted them with ink, and some that took a couple of coats before I was satisfied. As for the cement, try a rubber cement pickup which you can get at an office supply or art supply store. It looks like an eraser and works more or less like one too. You just rub it on the glue spots. Works well on contact cement or rubber cement.

You should also pick up Stolman's book on leather tools too (which I believe is on sale at Leather factory right now) I have been working at using a round knife to skive, wrecked a few things but am getting it down. Don't try to do it all at once, thin slices just like planing wood. My method is to do one side with the knife blade resting on my granite block at an angle, then the other, then shave down the hump in the middle. I think you could use a similar method with a safety skiver (I would not recommend a round knife for a first try). In fact with something like the end of a belt you could probably do it on a belt sander which would have the added advantage of keeping things even. Additionally, if you are using veg-tan leather, you can dampen the billet to help bend it around the buckle.