Fragbob

Wow! I actually thought those were -real- coins and not carving. I've always thought your work was extremely impressive but you had me completely fooled with these. Brilliant job!

Amazing work! I'd love to know how the coins themselves are being held in place since it appears the edges are still visible.

Completely understand where you're coming from! I've actually already assembled a (very) basic tool kit, comprising of a pretty nice diamond awl, an over-stitch wheel, and a home built stitching horse. I took two 12x6 pieces of 5oz'sh scrap veg tan and laminated them together. I then ran the over-stitching wheel over roughly the whole surface, with stitches running around half an inch a part just so I could get a ton of practice in doing it the old fashioned way. I can tell a huge difference between the first stitches and the last! That being said, I was just looking for a way to tidy up and give my work a little more professional appearance, as I've had the awl punch through crooked a few times and if I can find a way to make that not happen, I'm all for exploring options! DavidL - Thanks -a ton- for the link you provided! The video that jonasbro posted in there gave me some wonderful ideas to tinker with when I next head up to a member of my family's metal shop.

I appreciate both of you guys' input! Though I'm afraid I don't see a link in your latest post, DavidL.

Ahh! Ok, I thought you were talking about a sewing awl, not a standard diamond awl, like this one:

Appreciate the heads up St8Line. Would you mind explaining the benefits of using a stitching awl vs using a regular awl to open up your stitching holes and then using saddle makers needles to actually thread your stitches? As I've said I've been doing a lot of reading and watching quite a few videos but I don't think that's something I've had the benefit of coming across. It seems like most of the people I've seen working just go ahead and do the saddle stitching with the 2 needle method.

Yea. Check the edit I had made on the above post already. Thank you for linking it, however.

Alright, might as well get this out of the way. I'm brand new to the leather working world and am looking at diving straight in. If I'm not mistaken this will be my first post so bear with me if this idea seems somewhat outlandish and/or if it just won't work. So I've been assembling my tool kit, and have decided to pick up a set of nice pricking irons via Goods Japan. I've been lurking here, reading a ton, and watching absolutely insane amounts of videos and I think that these style irons will best suit me as I dip my toes into the leather world, both due to ease of use and due to reading great things about the quality of their tools. The fact they're able to be used to actually punch through leather also kind of caught me, as it seems they will lead to less overall mistakes than an actual awl when used with stitching wheel. The downside being that if you don't have your tool virtually straight up and down that your whole row of stitches on the back would come up out of line. So I had this idea... What if one were to drill a hole in the center of a cheaper Arbor press with a set screw inserted into the side to hold the pricking iron? This would guarantee both that the iron was always in the correct position as well as offer finer control over how deep you would be pressing the iron through the leather. It seems like it would offer the advantage of the precision of using a drill press (which was kind of where I got the idea to begin with) but still offer the clean, neat holes and no blow out on the back that I read the drill press seemed to have. Has anyone done anything similar? Are there existing tools out there that already offer this type of functionality? More importantly, does it sound like this is an idea that might actually work somewhat decently? I'm coming to the leather gurus yourselves first in order to just make sure this isn't a fools errand. Feel free to let me know! Edit: As an aside, I just realized I'm an idiot. I had poured through the tool forums here a week or so ago and didn't see anything matching my question, so I decided to make this post. It appears, however, that a couple of days ago someone came up with a thread very similar to my idea here!