BillB

sgt Doggy, Welcome to the forum. As Kate said, we are glad you stopped in. Please stay a while and share with us. The coffee and donuts are free and are down the hall in the corner. You will find a lot of friendly folks around here willing to share and learn. Your work speaks for itself. Look around, listen in on the conversations, find the ones that interest you and join in. Again, Welcome to the Forum BillB

Baker, Welcome to the Forum. Glad you joined us. I think you will find a lot of folks willing to help you, not only with your learning experience on leather, but also your class. We may not be able to attend, but we can help with suggestions and any advice that we can offer. Don't be afraid to ask. If you haven't found the coffee and donuts, they are down the hall in the corner and are free. Do you have a local Tandy store/ Have you talked to them? Tandy does have a number of Class Project kits. And Please send pictures and share our pictures with the class. Yes even the mistakes can be used as a teaching lesson. BillB

Hauss, Welcome to the Forum. We were all newbies to LeatherCrafts at one time or another. You will find a lot of helpful folks around here, all trying to learn and improve what we do. Look around, listen in, Join In, but most important, have fun. There are coffee and donuts down the hall in the corner and they are free. We you do have some items to post, please do so. We all had our first project and our first of many projects going to the parts bin. Since you did not mention what you plan to work on, do you have any idea what type of leather work you want to do? I would pick more than one to try, you never know what one will be the right one. Again, welcome to the Forum. BillB

I use a jigsaw with a fine tooth blade to do the initial cut. Since the plexiglass tends to heat up and leave some melted residual, I then finish it with a sanding drum on my drill press. I have not asked professionalplastics.com if they can do any fancy patterns, that might be next. One advantage I have found using the clear plexiglass is that I can place the pattern such that any blemishes go in spots where a second piece of leather will cover the blemish and I get more useable leather out of the side. BillB

I have several sets of hand tool setters from Tandy. They have served me will for over 30 years. They work well for the types of things I like to make: purses; writing bi-folds; quivers; western style holsters. They are small and portable and can fit into tight/small spaces. On the down side they are small and can move out of alignment easily. It also takes practice in understanding the amount of striking force to use when setting them. There is also the fact that there are usually less than 10 of any of these on one of my projects so I don't have to set many of them. Since you don't mention the types of projects you will be using these on and the number of pieces per project you will be setting, it is hard to give any advice other than to consider the quantity of them you plan to use on a project. BillB

I work with two types of patterns. The first pattern is for the leather pieces that will be cut from a side of leather to make the project I am working on. I use heavy construction cardboard at first and once I am happy with the pattern and will be using it alot, I will get a piece of plexiglass (1/4 inch). This gives me a nice to cut with. The second pattern is the design I am going to tool into the leather. I will use tracing film or a craftaid(s) depending on what my source is and the design I am trying to do. BillB

I have seen several posts on Steam Punk, so I did a quick search on "Steam Punk" using the search function and got 13 results. You may want to try the search function. BillB

Masterblaster666, If they are for general consumption, then there are several places you can post. On the leatherworker Board there is "Critique My Work" which is where you post if, you guessed it, you want to have people critique your work. The second place is "Show Off" which is where you want to show what you have been doing but do not necessarily want any comments. In addition to that there are the forums on various types of leather products where you could post your project. If it is not for general consumption, then you are headed in the right direction with the limited access section. BillB

RDS, A few weeks ago I answered a similar question in another thread and posted a series of pictures showing how my Al Stohlman maul is constructed. The leather discs of the head are held together by pressure only, no glue). If you glue them they will not have the flexibility that a non-glued maul has. In the end it is still your choice on how you do it. Here are the pictures I posted before. BillB

Bryan, On single layer or even two layer where on is just a liner, I will start and end the lace in the loop rather than the bite in the leather. This allows me to run the tail under the run of loops on the edge surface. I will run one tail in one direction and the other tail in the opposite direction. I hope this makes sense. BillB

Jehuty - Welcome to the forum. What type of leather items are you doing? Do you have any examples? Knowing what you intended to make will help identifying the leather suppliers you should look at. There is a lot of helpful information on this site and a lot of helpful folks as well. I hope you will look around and join in on some of the conversations and help extend the knowledge base that is here. Did Mr. Google show you where the coffee and donuts are? They are down the hall in the corner, help yourself, its free BillB

MasterBlaster666 - Welcome to the Forum. I think you will find a very friendly group of folks from around the world here. All of us are interested in the Art and Crafts of Leather. We each have our own stories of starting and how our first projects turned out. Walk around, talk to the folks, listen in on some of the conversations. Please join in when you have a question or something to added. There is free coffee and donuts down the hall in the corner. You will find lots of helpful information and instructions on doing things. Again, welcome to the forum BillB.

Why don't you draw your own? That is the way I always made holsters and it gives a much cleaner fit. That way any variants in the Colt's design gets accounted for. It's not that hard. BillB

You might want to check out the thread "Full color printing on leather" on the "Specialty Leatherwork" section under "Other Specialties" in the "Art" forum. BillB

A couple of processes come to mind: 1. Since leather is the skin of an animal, it could be tattoo work; 2. Since leather is porous like paper it could be a very good photo quality ink jet printer; 3. Or a very good Air Brush Artist. BillB

Watersnake - Please continue to work on you leather carving and posting examples of your work. It would be nice if we could guarantee that for every post on the site, there was at least one reply. That, unfortunately is not possible. We recently had a similar problem in the Member Gallery when we had a new member post and introduction and no one replied and that is not right. I now try to long on at least every other day and find those posts that have had no responses and welcome them to the forum. We should be doing the same on the Critique My Work forum so that there is at least on reply. As for your work. I did that craft aid a long time ago (not that I am much better with age) and found it very frustrating. Figure carving is hard enough as it is, but to also do it in a small form factor is even harder. I think you did a reasonably good job. There looks like there are some dotted lines in the water you missed and I agree with the comment on the fisherman's arm. I will give you this one piece of advice if you are using Tandy tools - go to antique stores and flea markets and see if you can find some of the older tools. I have three version of the bevel #101 and the oldest version is 1/2 the size of the newest version. For some reason their tools are gradually growing in size. This makes it even hard to do the small detail work especially on a small format like a wallet. Again, please don't give up. If it helps I recently posted a Bold Eagle carving I did and out of 147 views I got only 2 comments. BillB

Welcome to the forum Billy Brown. Although I understand you wanting to promote your business, I would have like to have heard more about the person Billy Brown and the type of leather work you have been doing. How long have you been doing leather work? What types of leather work do you do? I saw that you teach. Are you going to share those experiences with us on this site similar to what Paul Burnett has done? Do you have any pictures of your latest projects and your workshop? Bill B

There is also the practice used in counter intelligence and that is mis-information. Have your wife and friend drop hints that they are going to sell product "X" while all the time preparing to sell product "Y".

Vince, Welcome to the forum. As TwinOaks has already stated, lots of folks here interested in leather and all the things you can do with it. Walk around, meet everyone and join in the conversations. The coffee is great and the donuts are free. I noticed you are into making moccasins. My wife and I have been wearing moccasins for several years now as our normal foot wear. Here are some sites you might like to look at. www.natureskills.com/how_to_make_moccasins.html www.sodhoppers.com/html/how_to_make_moccasins_video.html www.womenofthefurtrade.com/wst_page11.html www.mukluks.com BillB

The bag you are showing isn't really a tool roll. A tool roll unrolls to a be a flat containing with pockets for the tools to set in and all the tools are visible once it is unrolled. The bag you are showing is more of a duffle or drum bag. The end seam on the right of the picture was sewn by pulling the bag over the arm of the sewing machine and then the "drum head" can be sewn onto the main body. It looks like in the picture that the left end of the bag has a removable lid, which where the arm of the sewing machine entered. If the bag in the picture is a high quality bag, there is probably a liner that was attached after the drum head was attached. That seam is under the lid and is formed by sewing the folded edge of the bag to the folded edge of the liner with the stitching capturing all four layers. The other way to attach the drum head would be to turn the whole thing inside out and do an edge seam. This would result in a different seam than what is pictured and all the stitching would be hidden inside.

A very long bladed sharp knife; a long straight edge; weights to place along the straight edge to help hold it in place; marking and scoring the leather with a line to show where to cut should be, even with the straight edge (helps to let me know if the leather shifts); lots of light pressure cuts using as much of the length of the blade as possible (spreads the cutting forces along a greater surface area); patience when making the cuts. Alternative if you do this a lot - buy a good quality strap cutter.

It looks like a Trademark for a company. You might want to try the US Patent and Trademark Office atwww.uspto.gov/trademarks. They have a search tool for look for existing and old trademarks. BillB.

Just never ride it into Washington DC on Rolling Thunder. DC has some strange gun laws. BillB

Have you tried the Thread Exchange at www.thethreadexchange.com. Since all of those seats are industrial made, you are probably looking at a heavy weight industrial thread commonly used sewing machines. The Thread Exchange carries a number of different types of threads, sizes and colors. By they way, waxed thread is not dirty and grimy. It is waxed for a purpose, to keep water out so it does not rote. This type of thread is commonly used on things that see a lot of all weather exposure. Something the seats in a car do not. Bill B.

Have you tried The Leather Crafters and Saddlers Journal? Their web site is www.leathercraftersjournal.com. BillB