JohnBarton

I will mention this to him. He said that he is going to start a business here in China to sell tools that he has designed. If I can get him to come and do a clinic for us then I will ask him if we can film it to share with others. He may even be interested in doing video tutorials that someone else could lay down a translated narration of.

Bobcat was at my place last night and I was asked to ask him this question. He said that he laid out the design on the computer and simply reversed the image and then crossed it a little. Then when he transferred it to the leather he only did the large outlines and did the detail by freehand. Thus you can see that even though the base image is the same the detail is different on each side. Folks I have to tell you that Bobocat is a cool cat. He is totally committed to the art of leather tooling. Myself, Zhen Hai, Long Wei, Bobocat's friend Kevin, and my wife had a lovely evening discussing leather working, philosophy of design, the zen of teaching others and other topics. Just an example of how committed he is; he told us that when he sees something that someone else did he will print a picture and tape it to his wall and think about it for a month. Then he will tool it and a year later he will do another one to compare his skill to the previous year's work. He doesn't do customer orders, he makes what he wants to make and sells his work accordingly. He won't put a customer's name on his work. He said that it only has value if it only has my name on it. Not talking about sentimental value here :-) I thoroughly enjoyed the evening and hope that next time Bobocat is in our area I can hire him to do a clinic in our shop. We have already improved just based on the small amount of instruction he gave us last night.

I will.

If anyone wants any of these I will happy to ship it to you for the cost of shipping only. I have no idea what granite slabs cost. These types of things are available here all over the place as this is the stone mining capital of China.

This is what's behind my shop. All the granite slabs you could ever want. The stone factory moved out and this is what they left. Just thought I'd tease you all a little. :-) And Bobocat will be at my house tomorrow. If you have any questions tell me and I will ask him.

That's pretty cool. Especially the way the horses seem to running through the grass on the breadbox. The laser is a neat tool that can be used to come up with some very artistic work. We use the laser all the time to cut parts and also to lay down patterns. Here is a case we just finished where I designed the name in Corel Draw and then lasered etched it very lightly on the piece for Zhen Hai, our carver to work his magic on

One of our apprentices corresponds with Bobocat - I will have him ask about the dyes/paints. We can also browse the Chinese forum that Bobocat runs and get some information there.

We use a type of silver pen to define our sewing lines. It rubs off with a little alcohol and leaves no trace. I don't know what it's called but it's available here in all the sewing shops. I have only ever seen them in use in factories though. No secrets here :-) We share so everyone gets better.

I recommend sewing in a liner with foam rubber underneath it. This would allow you to make a cell phone case that "adjusts" to each type of phone and would either drop the need for a flap or allow you to do something like an envelope style flap that tucks under a retaining strip of leather. This is something I did for a customer for the cue cases I build. It worked perfect as a universal (at least for the four different models we had in the shop that day) cell phone holder. http://www.jbcases.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=2458 Here is a pic with no phone in it. Lastly, the Chinese leather workers do a lot of cool patterns for cell phone holders. They share patterns too. I'd contact forum member Bobocat and ask him because his forum is pretty active with stuff like this including step by step tutorials.

Very nice. If I could make one suggestion - and this comes from my days as a traveling showman responsible for displaying cues. I'd make a slight depression in the leather where the knives are supposed to lay so that they would always be in the same place. It makes a big difference when people pick them up and put them back. If there is a "place" to put them then people naturally put it back there. If not then they lay it down wherever. IF you adopt this suggestion then you may want to make the back side slightly higher to make the knife angle toward the viewer a bit more. Just a slight angle will highlight the knife a lot more.

Peter's work is so brilliant and clean. I wonder what the symbolism is for the chickens?

FANTASTIC piece! So much depth and it all goes together. Excellent.

Here is a case that was done by the Jiasen Billiard Cue Case Company. I have been working with them for over a year and encouraging them to be more creative. They sent me this along with many other top cases to our annual Billiards Expo in June. If you want to see more detail then go here: My AZ Gallery

Here is a trick for laser engraving on leather. Use soap scum to mask with. We get the soap bar a little slimy so that the surface is waxy. Then we smear that over the leather and engrave it. Then when it's done you just wash it off and it takes all the ash with it. We also use masking tape and resist to wash out the engraved portions. I just did a piece where the engraved portion was painted white. So I masked the leather with tape, engraved it and then applied resist. After taking the tape off I swabbed the piece with resist to clean off the rest of the residue. You have to be careful with tape however as it will raise the grain on some leather. Another trick to mask with is wet newspaper. The newspaper clings to the leather. For cutting I will often take more cuts at lower power - raising the bed each time to reduce the charring on the edges. Or I will make a shallow cut and use the razor to finish it. Not really possible with complex parts though. Generally if you play with the settings you can find an acceptable one that gives you great results. Thanks for the suggestion to cut a little oversize and sand off the charred edge. I am gonna try that. John

Thanks. It's a team effort though. I do the general design and Zhen Hai does the tooling. My mother in law and brother in law do the sewing. I just direct. :-) (and sometimes pick up a tool)When I see the beautiful work that you all put out as individuals I am constantly floored knowing that I don't have the patience or personal talent to do most of that work.John Thanks - yours is pretty sporty as well.I really like the way you are putting the cases together. Very clean and efficient.

You're welcome. Our resident tooler, Zhen Hai Lee, is also a tattoo artist. So he was excited to do this case as well. I love tattoo flash and think that there is so much that can be done to combine it and leather tooling. As you well know. It was interesting to me to learn that tattoo ink doesn't really work for leather. Apparently it has to do with the fact that the cells are all filled up with chemilcals and they don't absorb the ink as live cells do. Or something like that. Was an idea that I had and found that others had as well that didn't really work. Your seats kick ass by the way - I have been looking at them for quite a while now.

Tom, Just went to your website. Really nice work! I love your style. If I make a "Tom Swede" style cue case I will give you full credit for the influence. First we need to learn to lace half as good as you do it. :-) John

You're welcome. This particular piece has a lot of depth to it. It comes from a lot of conversation between Doc and I and similarities in our lives. I am sure that some of you have worked on pieces that have some deeper meaning for you and this is one for me. Doc gave me full reign to do whatever I wanted to on this case. Thus it's far more then some ink on leather for both of us.

We just finished this one for a customer in Florida. The design, from what goes on it to how it's built, took us about a year in discussion and about two months in actual build time. As you can see we laced up the sides and the job could have been better. We didn't think about the tight circle when designing it so it took almost a week to lace it up tightly. The ring holders for the handle were designed and cut by me on the laser cutter. I went through several versions before settling on the ones you see. In retrospect I should have skived the lower portion to bring down the profile of those parts. The lid and Combat Medical Badge were cut by laser and the tooling is all done by hand. All in all the piece came out well and the customer was very pleased - his words "%^&%%ing Amazing" More pix at www.jbcases.com/doc.html If you go here you can also see a cute little "extra" hidden storage space that I built in using the laser and magnets.

That is a sweet sheath for a wicked knife. My friend Chas makes them to fit sometimes like this. He once loaned me several sheaths with the knives. That was a heavy responsibility to have those knives and sheaths with me as they together represented over ten thousand dollars' worth of stuff. But the reaction to the work was worth it. Nothing like the proper fit for the piece. That's quality and class.

Here is one we did with scales. It's all carved.

Wow! I have seen Ron Ross' work up close on Jack's cases and it is outstanding. I am sure that there are some things that could be "better" in some people's eyes but you really have to see the cases in person to appreciate how they all come together. I am sure that there are lot's of opinions as to what really good carving is. I love Chas Clements' work for example and Jack doesn't think he is so great. Another very good cue case maker who is a good carver with tons of experience recently looked at Ross' work on Jack's case and declared it without flaws. Now you obviously don't agree but it's a matter of opinion. On that score I agree that there are carvers in the world who are unquestionably on another level as the rest of the world. I am unqualified to put Ron Ross in with that group nor even qualified to to make my own list of who that group is. I just want to say though that having been around the cue case business for about 20 years, Ron Ross' work is some of the very best to appear on cue cases. Frankly I am surprised to see that there are so few real "leather workers" who make cue cases in addition to what else they do. This is a perfect match to high end leather work. Most of you probably have no clue about where the custom cue market is at. There are well over 500 custom cue makers in the world with most of them in the USA. Cues go from $500 to hundreds of thousands. There is plenty of business for more case makers. I am sure that with the creativity shown by the members here that you would love to see your work as part of some high end collector's mueseum or better still on display as someone's daily use personal case. Take the opportunity to work with a cue case maker and offer to collaborate, or make your own. Anyway, that's my 2cts, worth about .000001cts on the reputation exchange rate chart. :-)

At the beginning we made what we wanted to and put them up for sale. This past year we have been getting lots of orders so those are what we are focusing on now. I'd like to get to a ratio of about four orders to one case that we do of our own expression.Perrhaps you couldn't survive on cue cases in Sweden alone but I know that there is a lot of interest in Europe. I lived in Germany for 10 years and started my last case company there. I am sure that you could find a decent number of customers in Europe. My last three cases went to Greece. I'd sure reccomend trying a few. Befriend a pool player and ask them what they want :-)Sweden has two Champion Players that I know of, Tom Storm and Marcus Chamat. And of course there is Sweden's most famous pool export, Former World Champion, Eva Mataya Laurance. www.strikingviking.com You could start with any of them and be well on your way to becoming a cue case maker. :-) I do a lot of marketing in the most popular internet billiards forum, www.azbilliards.com. Now after a year in business we are getting several requests each week.

- blush - thanks! The credit really goes to our whole staff - all four of us. I do the preliminary concept design, Zhen Hai does the on-case design and tooling, my mother in-law sews the liners and does all the sewing, my cousin in-law does the grunt work for now. He is learning to tool though.

Being in China I deal with this all the time. Basically it's like this, an item made by someone for their own personal use can contain a representation of a logo. One cannot sell or give away that item however without infringing on the trademark owner's property. One cannot use an item that contains a logo that they do not own or license in commerce or for any commericial purpose. Thus one cannot make "Harley" gear legally for sale. An example, you see a great tooled Harley bag in the Harley shop. You can't run next door and have Joe Leatherworker make you one with the Harley Logo on it legally. However YOU can make one and use it legally. As for the stickers and patches - if you aquire them from a legal source then you can attach them to anything you personally use. You can't however attach a Harley patch to a leather bag you made and sell it as a Harley Bag. You can have Joe Leatherworker make you a bag and have the patch sewn onto that bag. That's ok. Joe Leatherworker can't buy the Harley patches and make a line of "Harley" bags to sell to you though. Confusing? You bet. We deal with this all the time from custom pool table cloth, to advertising items, to sports fans who want stuff with their team's logo. We can show off things we have done which have logos on them as examples of what we can do. We cannot offer for sale any of those items with the logos on them without written permission from the owners/licensees of those trademarks. Personally I think that as long as something is a one off for personal use and the logo is intended to be used in an artistic way then it's no problem for a leather worker to use it for a customer. What I mean by that is if the intent is advertise the brand without representing the underlying product as "made by" that brand, then it's no harm to the brand. An extreme example would be getting the Harley logo tatooed on yourself. If the intent is to make people think that the THING is made by the company that owns the brand, i.e. a T-shirt that has the Nike emblem on it, then that is infringment and not a good thing to do. Ah the wonderful world of intellectual property. I'd be a millionaire several times over if I had the profits from all the cue cases that have been and continue to be sold using my designs. If you all want to make some T-Shirts with JB Cases on them go ahead :-) But please don't make cue cases with JB Cases on them.........