JohnBarton

LOL. It's ok, if any of us can have half the success Jack has had in both making consistently fantastic cases and making friends throughout the world then we will have a wonderful life. Please just call me John. When I said that we "print" it with the laser I meant that we cut the pattern out using cardboard using out laser cutter. Before we had the laser cutter we would literally print the pattern on paper and transfer it to cardboard. You need to set your printer to print a full size and if your program has a way to tile the printout then do that. You can test your printer settings by making a rectangle and then printing the rectangle to insure that it comes out exactly at the size you created it to be. You can also have places like Kinkos print out your patterns in full size - I don't know if they can print on posterboard. Any sign shop can easily do your patterns and cut them with a plotter or also laser cut them. But honestly, you don't need all that. Right now you need to focus on keeping your patterns simple and learning how to make them by hand. There have been a lot of good suggestions here on materials to use for your patterns. Like I said I prefer the cardboard. Another thing I would suggest is to use the printer to test your patterns. I regularly build paper mockups where I will print the patterns and use scotch tape to mock up the part. This really helps to work out the kinks before you start cutting up a bunch of leather.

The best way to do this is to make your holes just big enough to put your post rivets into on the under piece so that they will stay in place. Do one side then the other, don't try to do both sides at once. Now set your rivets with the open leather laying flat. Then you want to ideally have a round iron bar in a free clearance sort of setup to set the closing line. The suggestion of using a v-notched support on each side is a good one but in a pinch you can support an iron bar between two stable surfaces - bricks, wood whatever and something like a towel under each end to keep it from moving. You can use a flat piece of iron if you like but make sure it's not going to crease your leather as you maneuver it on the bar. This is why I prefer the round piece. We have a welded X-stand that has four different bars sticking out of it - two flats and two rounds of different sizes for different application involving putting on rivets, snaps, and latches. This is more than you need for what you want to do here. Make sure that the iron bar is sufficiently thick so that your hammering on it won't dent it or bend it. I don't know jack about iron so I take a hammer with me when I go to the scrap yard looking for pieces we need. Another thing I would suggest is getting three or four GOOD heavy duty large clamps. These are expensive but worth their weight in gold around the shop. I can't tell you the amount of times we use an iron bar and clamp it to the work bench in various positions to be able to set rivets in funky positions and such or for some other purpose. You have one drawback with the way you intend to do this according to your drawing and by the time you read my reply you will have probably figured it out. It is that the leather will raise along the line where the two pieces are butted against other on the curve and look bad. What we do when we close the case in this way is to leave some room for the underpiece to lay down on the curve. I am at home right now or I would send you a picture of a piece we did to illustrate this. You can see it in action somewhat if you look at the pictures of the Palace Garden case that we profiled on here several months ago. On that case we did this type of closing method except that we chose to sew the seams instead of rivet them. You can see that we let underpiece (connector) also hold the strap retainers and side handle. Anyway, that's my advice for you. Hope it helps. Making cases this way is much harder than doing it the "envelope" way but I think much more rewarding.

We use thin white cardboard, similar to posterboard but cheaper. This is what we use for all of our patterns because it can be written on folded, taped, and easily duplicated. Cardboard can be folded along the centerlines to insure that it is accurate and symetrical. This ability to fold it also means that you can often make other parts when you need just a section of a pattern for some reason, i.e. just the corner of that pattern for this new pocket. We generally make the patterns on the computer and use the laser to cut them. When we make a pattern by hand we will duplicate on the computer so that it is always there for us in the event that we lose or destroy a paper pattern. Also by being on the computer we can modify and make an new pattern in very little time. Over the years I have tried many substances for patterns including some of the ones mentioned above and I always come back to the cardboard due to it's flexibility. When the laser is down, out come the patterns and we continue making the parts without skipping a beat with the exception of the very complicated parts that have a lot of intricate curves. Then we just take more time and use the exacto knife. I am not your idol Phillip? I am hurt. ;-)

That's pretty COOL! If you need any advice at all let me know. We have had lasers for several years and while I am not an expert I do have a lot of experience at this point using lasers to cut and decorate leather and other items. Believe me that there is some trial and error you will need to do. A good place to read about lasering is at Sawmill Creek. www.sawmillcreek.org in the CNC section. This is a woodworking forum with a laser section.

I think that anyone that buys their "name brand" bag at a bag party is probably getting a fake bag and that would explain the lack of quality in it.

One of my customers has obtained a zebra skin from an exotic feline rescue center. The skin is currently in the meat locker at the center. He would like to get it tanned for teh purpose of making cue cases out it. It's in Indiana. Any help? Is there a hobby tanner here who wants to take it on? A professional tanner who will give us a quote on doing the work? Any relatively easy way to do it ourselves? Any Mountain Men who don't wrestle with knives strapped to their chest in flimsy sheaths who tan their own hides? :-) Thanks in advance - I don't know what the shelf life of a skin is when kept in the refrigerator but I have to guess it's not long so time is probably short to get something done. John

LOL. Well since the Kindle is for reading I'd guess that they would know how to read. The real question is would they know how FIND information without being tethered to the internet? Does anyone know how to go to a library anymore and find information the old fashioned way with a card index file? Do libraries even use non-electronic filing anymore? I personally like the idea of ebooks. I am reading a lot of the classics now on my new Ipod Touch. I have a whole library at my fingertips. I downloaded all of the stories from the Brothers Grimm to read to my baby. I am a nomadic sort. I left more than 20 boxes of books behind in the USA. Most of them I donated to others before I left. I carried most of the books with me around the world for 20 years. Now I have more than that in my pocket or at my fingertips. That said, there is nothing about reading anything on any computer device that can replace the tactile good warm feeling of reading a book or magazine. Books are natural, they feel good, they don't run out of battery life, you can take them anywhere and not worry about dropping them. You can fall asleep reading a book and not worry about it when you find it on the floor in the morning or crushed under your pillow. Lastly, to speak to the Big Brother mentality, I find the idea that with electronic devices your every move is tracked - ostensibly for customer service reasons - to be completely repulsive. More repugnant is the idea that "they" can go into your machine and delete items you have on it. My Ipod touch is jailbroken. I have turned off Apple's killswitch so they cannot just go in and disable whatever they want to. I find Apple's products to be very nice and cool but their controlling nature to be very much like the "Big Brother" that they were supposed to be against in their iconic Superbowl ad in 1984 where the lone protester is standing up to Big Brother. Now Apple has become that which they said they would never be. Much more so than Microsoft whose products are not as sexy and "cool" but in fact are a lot less restrictive. Is the Kindle worth it? Not to me when I can get an Ipod touch or even an Iphone for about the same price and still get just about every book in the world on it. And I can do a lot more than read books. There I have addressed everything in one post. Going to listen to a podcast now :-)

Thank you Billy for all the wonderful art and inspiration. I hope sincerely that you can recover as best as is possible. You did a cameo that completely blew me away. I am sure you have heard the term "blown away" in reference to your work. I have never met you, and sadly probably never will, again thank you and I wish you the best from here on out. John Barton - apprentice.

For me it comes down to durability. I don't like to put decoration on the leather when I know it's likely to be scratched or worn off. I can see the 2-Shews method being great for low use items. But for something like a cue case I'd have to figure out how to be certain that it would stand the test of time and use. Something like a sublimation process that turns the color to gas and permeates the receiving surface is what I REALLY want. Something where you can pull, stretch, bend and otherwise beat up the leather without the color coming off. Utopian? Probably. Maybe the DigitalLeather application that Clay showed us is close or is that, I don't know. Until then though using the Plaid, Picture This method seems quite promising depending on how you do it. I have a guy who wants a certain flag done and I don't want to paint it on. The last case we did with lots of paint is not an everyday case for the owner so it will mostly be in a display cabinet. The owner was made aware of my dislike for paint on the surface and he said go ahead. Anyway, seems like there are many things out there that work to get images onto leather. Here is a another one: http://www.lazertran.com/about_lazertran.htm And the book reference I got it from: Book of Transfers

I bought the 2-Shews video. That guy is AMAZING. I have seen the transfer stuff before and wondered if it would work on leather and for whatever dumb reason wouldn't come up off the $5 to buy a bottle. But what makes Billy amazing isn't that he transfers to leather - it's what he does with it to bring the image to life. Truly great techniques he has developed there. I personally think that images which are just put on stuff are often cheesy looking. I am referring to the type of thing where you put a picture on a coffee mug. However I find that the ones which are done with some flair and dressing up often look pretty cool. Billy puts the penultimate flair on what he does in my opinion. Using leather as the medium allows some pretty wicked artistry to be used. DC Knives - I bet you are going to rock it with this technique.

Or how about the story of the bar owner who was charged with and convicted of manslaughter when he electrified the window and a thief tried to break in and got stuck and suffered a heart attack from the electrical shock.

You could definitely get this detail with pyrograpghy. And honestly I wouldn't put it past some of the artists here to figure out how to do this with normal leather tools. With the laser though this sort of work is definitely easier once everything has been properly setup. SOMETIMES it's as easy as loading the graphic and letting it go and other times hours and days are needed to get everything just right to get to come out nicely. The laser is essentially a printer so it's clear that it can reproduce detail on a 1:1 basis. Here in Xiamen though there are artists who do engravings on granite. They use a little tiny chisel and a hammer and can reproduce any photograph to the smallest details.

It's both. It's a mechanical process with the end result being artistic. You have to be a bit of an engineer to put leather pieces together in such a way that they are very functional and durable. That's mechanical. Making them pretty at the same time - that's art. Any of us with sufficient experience and a little common sense can throw together a functional and fairly durable briefcase in a matter of hours. I know that If I did that though mine would look like a kindergarten age kid went nuts with the rivet setter and razor knife. It would hold stuff and close and so on but it wouldn't win any prizes for fit and finish. NOW some people can use the same materials, same tools and get that rough industrial look to the point where it is art. Not me. What I do have a decent eye for is composition which my wife the ballet dancer says is also a form of art. I can "see" the way I want a design to turn out and usually they turn out well enough to please the customer. But if you ask me to draw a tooling pattern - forget it. I am lucky if I can draw a daisy. Which is sad because as a kid I did have a little talent for drawing but I never developed it. So, yes, when you create something then it can be art. Now some hold the view that if it's useful or functional, as in a bag, then it's not art. This debate will never end. For me, when I look at something and it gives me the warm fuzzies inside when I look at it that's art or love or nausea...... I like to go with art or love.

:-) Were you in school in the 1400s? Just kidding - your statement sounded like 'we used to use these in school' - maybe I need my drugs.....

That just flat out blows me away. There is nothing that you have done that I have felt is less than perfect. Amazing.

Very Sweet! My only critique is that I would have made the pocket long enough for the drumsticks or made a separate pocket for them. I LOVE the way your figures are shaded they really jump off the leather with vibrancy. Now I wish I had my drum here. :-( I can't play it but I could always bang on it and imagine I could.

Nice looking work Wolle. Glad you found my idea with the custom ring holders on the handle and straps worthwhile. It took me about two days and many revisions to get them all worked out where the lacing fit just right and the part laid down on the curve jsut how I wanted. I think that this is a nice touch on the type of cue case that is laced up the side like this. This is the original one we did for the Doc case - www.jbcases.com/doc.html The only thing I would caution you on when doing your version like you did is that the strap is going to be stressing out the lacing and over time I'd bet that this fails at this point from what I can see in the picture. Of course if you have added some other reinforcement that I can't see then disregard that warning. Welcome to the cue case making club. I like your style and will probably borrow some of your elements as well. Very creative. John

Looks great Marcel. I wish my second case had looked that good. Work on the few things we discussed about this case and the next one will really shine. Very proud of you for completing two cases already. John

Here is a funny story for you about exotics and customers. And it's not over yet. I have a good customer who is a dealer - he has standing orders with me and would buy everything I make if I let him. This is his website, www.indyq.com and his name is Roy. Roy has been in the high end cue and case business for a long time and has a wide range of wealthy and loyal customers. One of these customers is a high ranking military officer in Indonesia who is attached to the British SAS - these are the badasses of the British militiary - UKRay, help us out here - like the Seals and the Rangers rolled into one - So this customer of Roy's has a guy under him who is something of a real life Rambo. Roy's customer mentions to the guy that he wants to get a case made out of alligator or crocodile. So they decide to go and pick out a crocodile from the far. He goes to a crocodile farm in Indonesia and picks out one that is about 8-10ft and tells the people that he wants that one. The guy at the farm refuses to go in and get it saying it's too big for him - will have to be done another day and anohter way, etc.... So Rambo wades in and jumps on the croc and drives a knife through it's head and drags it out of the pond with no regard to the other animals there or the protests of the farm's guy. He drags it out and says something like "get it ready". So now my customer Roy, calls me and tells me we have an 8ft croc skin that is going to be tanned in Indonesia and how can we get it into China to make a case for his customer. Well turns out this isn't so easy. First it's difficult to find out who to go to just to get the proper CITES paperwork for importing to China and then you need an import license from the Chinese government and these are difficult to obtain. So we are left with having to go through a broker who will import on their license and "sell" us the skin once it's in China. All well and good but it's a pain in the butt and reliquishes control over this $500 skin that my customer, Roy has paid for. So I am hesitant to go this route because I fear that the skin will disappear between Indonesia and me and I won't be able to do anything about it. So sometimes the customer not only will pay for the exotics, they will kill them for you to. I need to tell them they have to be responsible for getting the skin to me as well. :-)

This one was done for a customer who wanted a case that has a lot of work but is not flashy. He wanted a case that people wouldn't notice as soon as he walked into the room. I think we managed it with this one. The customer wanted to combine floral tooling with reptile prints so we did that. The sides are filled with florals done in black and textured on the scallops to transition into the reptile print on the front and back. For the top pocket we did a custom built magnetic Puzzle latch that doesn't open by itself and has a solid and satisfying closing force. It's hard to explain in words but when you use this latch you will understand that it's the best solution for this type of pocket for what the customer wanted. It's not a commercial magnetic latch found on purses - we designed it from scratch. For the closure on the case itself we did a custom in-house design Puzzle Latch. This is another type of latch I invented where the flap is locked into the body by the leather nesting into the guides on the body. This allows the body to absorb the stress that would normally be on the latch when the case is carried by the top handle. The customer also requested a shoulder pad that is twice as long as our normal one. No problem and no extra charge :-) We used black gunmetal rivets to complete the look. This is a very hard case for me to take pictures of. (Karl I promise to send you my camera specs so you can teach me how to use it) It probably would have helped if I didn't use a black background on this one. The case is a 2x5/3x4 configuration. Well that's one of the cases we have been up to lately. More to come later when I get caught up on picture taking and editing.

The Russians really love the embossing. I have seen a few sites with Russian leather art like this. One guy does great big panels and leather sculptures out of whole hides. Thanks for the link - more to study and try someday.

For those that don't know this is called an ACH or Automated Clearing House transaction. It is the way that "electronic checks" are done and businesses like PayPal and subscription houses started using ACH to do automatic deductions. The largest danger here and it's a BIG BIG BIG one is that ACH requests can ONLY Be canceled from the merchant NOT by the account owner. So most banks will refer you back to the merchant when you dispute an automatic deduction. I used to have a bunch of these out there when I thought it would make my life easier. But they don't and they can wreak havoc on your bank account if they deduct the wrong amount or you get to low in your account around the time a deduction comes along. I used to have a seperate paypal account for accepting money that was not tied to any real world bank account. Then when I got money into it I would transfer that money to a second paypal account that was tied to an account. I NEVER left money in the first account and NEVER used it to buy anything. If it went belly up due to some transaction like what happened to Ray then I would have shut it down and opened another one. I ran a couple hundred Ebay auctions through that account. I have to say again that I have haven't had any trouble with PayPal BUT it pays to be cautious especially in light of new policies on the part of Ebay and PayPal. I never do business these days on Ebay and I almost always get paid through PayPal by people that I deal with extensively on their order before they pay me. I do use the same account now to also pay for things and it's tied to my account so there is the danger that it could be screwed with by PayPal but I have my fingers crossed. Twice in the past month PayPal has held up a transaction. Once it was on a payment I made, and PayPal actually called me to verify that I had made the transaction and it was legit. The other time was a few days ago when I received a deposit on a case. They put a reveiw hold on it and it was cleared the next day. On that one I was a little pissed off that they have taken an extra $9 without any indication as to why? I assume it was something to do with the exchange rate from my buyer's currency into USD but it would be nice of them to indicate that somehow. While we are on the subject of PayPal let me share this scam with you so that none of you fall into this trap. Beware of people who offer to pay you in two installments. The scam goes like this, they offer to pay you in two installments from different accounts. The first payment is a small amount and it list the item you are selling. The second payment is for the balance. As soon as you ship the item the scammer will dispute the second charge claiming that they didn't have anything to do with the purchase. PayPal will freeze the money and then eventually return it to the second account's balance UNLESS you jump through hoops proving how it all went down - and even then they may rule that it's not the "account holder's" fault and not give you the money. So if anyone offers this then decline because it's probably 99.99% a scam. It happend to several folks on the billiard forum who were cheated out of their cues. Most were able to get their cues back but not without a lot of help from the forum members acting locally where the scammer lives.

Paypal is both a friend and a foe. I have been very lucky to have had no major problems with PayPal and they have been extremely friendly to me whenever I have had issues that needed to be resolved. Luckily I have also not had anyone file a claim like this. Lately though I have become very concerned about Paypal's dispute policies. I had another friend in England have $20,000 frozen for months because of "suspected fraudulent activity". Paypal operates in a gray area - they are not a bank and so aren't subject to the law the way banks are - not that banks are any better to deal with. But essentially they own ALL records of transactions that you do on their system and that's why I am not keen to place too much of my business health on my ability to transact through Paypal. This really sucks that it had to happen to you. I suggest investigating alternative means of electronic payment such as Google Checkout, Neteller, WesternUnion, MoneyGram, etc.... or even merchant accounts. When I had my merchant account I had probably five claims in ten years and on all of them I was able to keep the money because I had gotten ALL the information needed to verify identity. Another thing that I have done in the past regarding paypal is to have multiple accounts set up. You will need a few bank accounts and a few email addresses but this has been something I have done in the past to make sure I always had a "working" paypal account. I also do NOT tie my paypal account to my real email address. I use a catch-all box on my domain that allows me to make up email addresses on the fly. The catch-all box accepts all emails that are addressed to @jbideas.com and are not already assigned an email box. Thus I can make up a new email and get a new paypal account instantly if need be. Of course this doesn't mean that you can get around the other things PP wants to "verify" the account. I do that by having several bank accounts and using the "virtual credit card" feature that my bank offers. This assigns a valid credit card number that I can use for online purchases. So I tie that to the new PP account and they are none the wiser because their computer can't distinguish between a credit card number assigned to a real card and a virtual one. Of course none of this actually helps you to get your money from this jerkoff. On that score I'd start out by explaining to Paypal that you are going to start a class action to protest the way they handle claims. I don't know what to tell you. Maybe file a complaint with the police in this man's town? This is one of the crappy downsides to the internet. Even crappier since this time you personally met the guy and offered to rescind the deal. I wish I had a better answer for you. Hope it works out soon!

My advice is to take two spaces if you can afford to. There is a book called The Science of Shopping or something like that and the main point in the book is that people do NOT stay anywhere that they feel crowded in. The book was written by an anthropologist who is contracted by retail chains to study shopper behavior from an anthropological standpoint. That book forever changed the way I display at shows and now I make sure whenever I can that I am giving people plenty of space to browse and peruse without other people crowding them and making them move on. With a 10x10 it's very tough to do this. But I still will use all the wall space I can and get everything up around eye level if possible. For stock: Well I am a big fan of bringing everything I can stuff into the car. I just hate to run out of things that sell well. But I wouldn't go crazy making things just for stock purposes. Two things that are an absolute MUST for you. A guestbook for people to sign up to get emails from you as well as a notebook for taking down addresses orders etc.... and custom invoices. I made custom invoice forms with my logo and info on it. I made them as carbonless copies so that I could write one to keep and give the customer the top the top copy. This came in handy so many times. They are cheap to make at Kinkos. Design your own at a size you like - make yourself a holder for it with a bottom flap to put between sheets so you don't inadvertantly copy on ten sheets - (done that). People save receipts and I got plenty of repeat business because someone stuffed their receipt in the case they bought and down the line when asked where they got the case they pulled out the receipt and handed over the information. The copy you keep for yourself is your record of what and to whom you sold something. I am bummed that I can't find the files to send you to use as examples. Signs: If you are busy you can't talk to everyone at once. I used to make small signs to display next to my work with information about the product or information about the process. I even went so far as do them as thought bubbles and arrows and would print them myself, cut them out in teh right shapes - laminate them myself and then recut them again so that I laminated signs in neat shapes. I find that oddly shaped signs get read more. I am a signage freak at shows. I always took my laptop and a portable printer and cardstock so I could make signs on the fly. At one point I was even making signs for a lot of the other vendors. (hope I got karma points for that....) Make sure everything has a price on it or next to it. People HATE to have to ask ESPECIALLY if they have to WAIT to ask for a price as will happen when a few people want to talk to you at once. Some people are pay and go types who see it, want it and want to buy it and go as soon as possible. Make it easy for these types because if it's not they leave quickly without spending their money on your stuff. Pens: Buy a crapload of them. You don't want to be hunting for something to write with. Have 20 pens or more stashed for easy retrieval. Trust me on this one. I'd have 40 and get ones that are reliable. Water: Have a cooler full of water bottles on ice, maybe some sodas, maybe even some beer (don't know the show or it's visitors). Nothing will endear you to a customer like offering them a cold drink on a hot day. I can't tell you the amount of times I have offered a chair and a drink to a weary booth vistor and they leave $400 lighter. I don't really want to talk about the time we had a cooler full of "juice suprise" - I am still not sure if that was a good idea or not but we sure had a good time that week. :-) (Juice Surprise was essentially some fruit juicy sort of drinks from the dollar store mixed in with all sorts of alcohol in a water jug with a tap - we shared it with the other vendors and select visitors to the booth.....) The hotel is your friend when it comes to filling your cooler with ice each morning. Also a rolling cooler with a drain is a godsend for this. I realize that this is probably not your first show. My tips are based on doing shows for over ten years - shows with up to 7000 players in a weeklong event where I am open 18 hours a day. I have done them alone and with a staff of eight. So take what you can use and leave the rest. Have an AWESOME show and GOOD LUCK at your first major!

I have a customer that wants florals which fade from black on the outside to gray in the center. This piece by Karen Bentvelzen is the technique I am looking to learn. By the way - Karen's work ROCKS. You owe yourself a trip to her website - it's like leather Disneyland. Don't want any trade secrets made public but you can whisper it my ear if you want to :-) Thanks in advance for any help!