tazzmann

Do you have a web site or a catalog of your conchos? I am really interested in a USAF Concho.

Does he have a web site or can someone post a pic of one? What do you consider pricey? I need a good stitching awl as I plan to do more work that requires stitching and not lacing which is my specialty. Thanks!

Is there enough interest to have an archery board, for quivers, bow cases, etc?

I don't think bidding at the last minute is cheating either, with one caveat: It should be done by a human and not a computer. Many of the last minute bids are done via a computer program at the last few seconds of the auction while the bidder is out playing golf or some such, making it hard for those who don't have the sniping software to make a fair bid. That is why I don't do a whole lot on e-bay any more.

Hey eric, A good airbrush to get is the Paasche VL. It is a good all around airbrush and, if properly maintained will last you a long time. I only use spirit or oil based dyes, though I have been playing with the Ecoflow stuff, but I airbrush my dyes on, so I don't get the streaking. I would think that since Ecoflow is water based, you would need a good sealer to keeping it from running when wet.

I got one the other day too that was hard as a rock. I used a small propane torch and heated it up slightly and it turned into a paste that I was able to rub into the leather. Never thought about the oil trick.

Yup, brown bottle conditioner

This is a good topic! I have used a 90 - 10% ratio of water to Lexol in my water bottle for years. Spray a fine mist on leather and it carves wonderfully. i have been playing with spraying with an airbrush with some good results as well, but harder for larger pieces. Never thought of using baby shampoo. <_<

Very Nice piece. I agree with Howard about the bottom oak leaves. Other than that I think it looks great! I have been wanting to try that pattern, but haven't had the time yet.

Excellent job Freak! That rocks! I LOVE the coloring! Very nicely done!

It never hurts to experiment. When I was 14 and my friend got me into leather working, we had a Tandy store fairly close but I, being a kid, didn't have any money. My friend gave me some scrap leather, a couple of his older tools and a worn out wood mallet. I experimented and practiced for 6 months with those tools and that leather. I finally decided I wanted to take the plunge and make my own project. Looking back it turned out ok, but wasn't great. I even made some of my own tools to conquer certain problems. I still make some special tools today (a lot of one time use items) when I want a certain effect. The moral of the story is to have fun, which it sounds like you are doing. Don't be afraid to experiment, you won't learn what the tools can do it you don't use them in every possible way. Heck, I learned something new last night (see the thread in How do I do that about the cool eye) with tools that I have had forever. Keep practicing and you'll love it when your "real" tools get there!

Thanks for the kind words guys. I read them to him this morning and he beamed as he stuffed the wallet in his back pocket! :D unicornwoman (my daughter would fight you for that name), I didn't see any instructions that said to skip holes, so not sure what that was all about. hhmmmmmm.... skip holes.....why make it any more confusing by adding extra holes?

After looking at this thing looking back at me, I think with some time taken, this could make a REALLY good eye for my project. I will try it on a scrap piece and take my time to make it look better, then post the results.

I got to playing around last with some of my tools and was thinking about an upcoming project that I am going to be doing for a charity. usually when I carve animals, the hardest thingfor me to get right is the eyes. Well, using the following craftools (U353, S631 & 9059 stylus), I was able to come up with the picture below. I think it is freakishly real. Someone may already know how to do this, but I haven't seen it posted, so thought I would share... edit: After posting this, I realized the camera does not do it justice. It looks WAY more realistic in person.

i thought i would go ahead and throw this in as well... Here is a pic of me and him at one of his pack meetings during the Halloween season...

ok, finally remembered that my camera has a memory card. Here are the promised pics. Don't laugh, remember he is 7 and you could hurt his feelings easily! :D I guess i didn't take any "finished" photos. i will do that when the new battery is charged and post them here. Now, I AM a proud daddy, but I think he did great for his first project. What do ya think?

Hey Scouter, My son is also in scouts (a tiger) and has his first pinewood derby car race on Feb 9th. Since there are only 3 in his den he will be going to district even if he loses. tee hee. He designed the car and I cut it out for him and he did the sanding and will be doing the painting this week. The good thing is that he doesn't care if his car looks like $%#^%! He just has fun doing it. Don't get me wrong, he does get frustrated to no end when something doesn't come out EXACTLY the way he wants, but each time I ask him how he/we could have done things differently to make it come out better. As a result, he is starting to not get frustrated quite so much and looks at alternatives if something doesn't go exactly as planned. I usually design my own wallets and thought I would "try" the kit, thinking it MIGHT be easier than doing it all by hand. Well, lesson learned. We also sat and talked about the wallet when it was done and what we could have done to avoid problems. He came up with some pretty good suggestions, so I know at least some of what I have been saying to him has been sinking in. :D My wife supposedly bought a replacement battery for the camera today, so I might be able to get some pictures up tonight or tomorrow.

Hey Duke, I also live in Vancouver. Maybe we can get together sometime and pound some leather.

Steve, What is the max PSI for that machine? I have a 150 PSI 20 gallon compressor from Sears with filters and a precision regulator (not the stock one). I usually run about 15 PSI for my .03 needle. I would think about 8 PSI should be enough for the .05 needle depending on the CFM. Also, make sure that any lubricant you use does NOT contain silicone. It can mess up your spray. I use airbrush lubricant. It is cheap and I KNOW I won't have problems with it. Eventually I will get a Paasche or an Iwata to do my dyes, but for now the cheapo ABC airbrushes work well enough. I would love to see how you do your belts. I use frisket film to keep my stuff from getting messed up from over-spray, but always looking for other (and maybe even better) methods! :D

Thanks guys! I am not one for quitting. I may put something down for a while, go curse in the backyard, have a smoke (or drink) and then come back to it later when I am not so angry, but I never give up. Thankfully, my son has inherited this trait. He is an extremely bright kid with lots of enthusiasm for what daddy does. This makes me smile every day. He is using his wallet now and loves it. As soon as I can replace the battery in my camera (it wouldn't take a charge) I will post some pics. I REALLY want you guys to see what he created mostly by himself. I know you guys would appreciate it. Mike

One night last week I was out in my garage pounding on some leather. My son came out and asked what I was doing. He watched, transfixed, as I cut out a deer head and tooled it into relief. He asked if he could make something, so I said "Sure. What would you like to make?" His reply was "I want a leather wallet." Cool, I thought. Well, I didn't have any more wallet inserts, so I thought that this would be a good time to take a trip down to Tandy. My son went with me and gaped as we walked into the front door. I told him to take a breath and when he did, I asked him what he thought of the smell. He said it smelled "goooooooood". He passes his first test. We walked around through the store and could not find any pre-made, un-punched wallet insides like I used to be able to get. As we were walking around, my son noticed a wallet kit and said that he really wanted it. I looked at the kit and my stomach started to turn somewhat. The kit said "Intermediate" on it, but I thought that since I have been doing leather work for a while now, I should be able to help him past any bumps he might come across. We bought the kit and several other items that I needed and proceeded home. We went out to the shop and sat down at the bench. I gave my son some scrap leather and my swivel knife and showed him the basics of how to use it and let him practice. While he was doing that, I tore open the wallet package and began to look at the components and the instructions. First thing I noticed was that the inside backing was larger than the back. hmmmmm. Then I counted the holes on each side.... yup... different. hmmmmmm. Ok, how about the side of the "secret money flap"....different yet again....hmmmmmm. Ok, now I am thinking this is why I have never bought a kit and we need to take this back. My son wanted to try it anyway. His theory was that if it was NOT a kit and something was messed up, how would he need to fix it. Sounds good, I thought......In theory.... I laid out the pattern my son wanted to do and let him start carving. He did about 90% of the carving, which made me proud...Did I mention he was 7? The leather didn't want to case like the stuff I normally bought and I never could get just the right amount of moisture to make nice clean cuts like I usually do. After the carving, I decided that since he was 7, it didn't really matter if it looked like a quality wallet. So, we started the tooling. Again, he did about 90% of it. So, again, I was happy. And, once again, I had a time trying to get the leather cased right, so we had to do some parts over again. Then came the part I didn't think he would want any part of.... dying and painting. I was wrong. After the leather dried completely (overnight) we went back and started the painting process. I gave him some acrylic paints and a brush and said to go for it. For 7, I think he did a heck of a job. So far this kit seems to be working ok. Once the paint was dry and the Super Sheen applied, I went to help him glue the inside backing to the back. Still too long and not the correct amount of holes, I trimmed off one side and re-punched the holes. I lined up and did this with the rest of the pieces that we one or TWO holes too many. We got everything glued into place and then we started lacing. He got about 1/4 of the wallet done and then had enough of lacing. So I took over. As I was going around the wallet, I noticed that the holes were getting cockeyed from each other. I had to insert my needle at a 45 degree angle to the right to get from hole to hole. Concerned that I missed a hole, I went back and looked. Nope, didn't miss any. I then took out my calipers and started measuring distance between holes.... yup they were off. . Did I glue it on upside down? Nope, same problem on the other side. Apparently the pieces are not stamped as a set, so the holes drifted as they went down the line.... grrrrrrrr How did I fix this? Well, every so often I would have to go through the same hole twice to bring the holes back into alignment. Eventually I finished the lacing (he came over and did it himself for a few minutes every now and then) and called it good. He is happy with the way it turned out and that is all that matters. But the moral of this story is that I will NEVER buy a kit again! P.S. I will post pics of the finished project when I get home tonight.

I agree, you need to thin paint or dyes down to milk consistency. The airbrush you have is a nice one and will last a lifetime if taken care of. This site has a lot of good information on using your airbrush and maintaining it. This site also contains good information for learning to airbrush. Like in leather work, practice is what will make you better.

Steve, I use Airbrush City(http://airbrushcity.com/abk1/) airbrushes for my leather work which are all dual action (and pretty cheap on e-bay). I have one airbrush that is gravity feed (the GD100) that I do all my dyes and acrylics with and one that is siphon feed (the 1104) that I use for the Super Sheen as I have a cap that fits on the Super Sheen bottle nicely. The gravity feed has a smaller needle in it (.02) and I can get a pencil line or a line as big as 1 1/2" out of it with good coverage. The Supersheen requires a larger needle (.05) to spray on effectively. You don't have to push as much air with a larger needle and you don't have to dilute. I do dilute my Super Sheen with a little water just to thin it out a touch as I am running a .03 needle. I had to experiment a lot to get the correct ratio. In the jars I use (1 oz), I fill the jar up to just over 90% with Super Sheen and then put in enough water to bring it up to the bottom of the neck of the jar. This ratio seems to work good for me and my set up, but you might need to play with that ratio a touch depending on your airbrush and needle size. As far as cleaning goes, I spray a lot of different things through my airbrush (I am even playing with spraying a mixture of water and Lexol onto the leather to case it before carving. I have been getting some interesting results.) and it depends on what I am using as to what I clean my brushes with. With any Acrylics or Super Sheen, I use airbrush cleaner or acrylic paint thinner to clean. With the automotive paints that I use on motorcycles, I either use a solvent for cleaning larger paint guns or reducer, if I don't have any of the other available. A word of caution: a lot of airbrushes have rubber o-rings and seal. Acetone, reducer and paint gun cleaning solvent will DESTROY these parts. If you intend on using these products, do what I did and replace these parts with nylon versions. Also, once a week or so (depending on how often I use my brushes that week), I will completely disassemble the brush and thoroughly clean and lubricate it. I hope I explained everything well enough. Let me know if you have any more questions!

I use my air brushes all the time on not only motorcycles, but leather as well. It DOES take some time, especially if you use a gravity feed set up like I do, but for fine lines and blending color on leather, nothing beats it. I use both Acrylic and regular dyes on some of my leather and you can achieve some very good effects that you just can't get with a regular brush. My favorite is to spray, say a deer carving, with a lighter color brown dye and then use a darker dye on the shadowed area, very carefully blending into the lighter dye. It makes for a very realistic effect if done correctly. Plus, if you spray Super Sheen with an air brush, you can get a more even coverage and thus a much better end product, IMHO.

Hello all, I am originally from Guthrie, Oklahoma and have been since transplanted into Vancouver, Washington. I spent 3 years in Germany, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Japan while in the Air Force. Most of the three years was spent at Hahn AFB in Germany. I have a wife, a daughter and a son. The mother-in-law currently lives with us, but I hope that will be fixed soon. When growing up, I lived on 40 acres which then got cut down to 5 thanks to the oil companies. I worked every summer at the Lazy E Ranch where I herded cattle. I got into leather work when I was 14 years old. A friend of mine sat down one evening and showed me how to work in leather. He even gave me several large scraps to pound on. Later that week, he made the wallet that I still carry over 25 years later. Thus I like making wallets, belts and such. I don't do leather-working professionally, but I consider myself decent for only doing it part-time. By day I am a software engineer (really fancy for computer programmer) and at night (when I have time) I pound on leather. My current projects include helping my son make his first wallet, making my wife a cell phone case & a day planner and making my sister a clutch purse. Speaking of which, I should get off here and get started, huh? tee hee