JohnBarton

Some new cue cases we finished recently: more detailed pix at www.jbcases.com/forsale.html The Gambler Ron Ross Tribute - This one came about as a bit of challenge to see if we could do the style. Hot Rod - My favorite of the group! And the twins - fraternal sort of

Very Nice! Marcel. Don't sell your first one! I am so glad that our conversations have paid off. You did a fantastic job. I am really happy to see that you went with stitching the back instead of rivets. That is a lot more work but the look is so much cleaner. I am concerned that the hinge area of your lid on the back will be too weak to support the top. You probably want to reinforce that area and make it a little larger. The latch you chose is weak but I know you don't have a lot of choices. Since you know it's limitations it will work for your use but remember that it's on the weak side for this type of case when you make cases for others. Lastly, your side handle also appears to be a little weak. Using one piece of leather seems strong now but it tends to stretch with the weight of the case. Again, for your own use you will be more in tune with what your case is doing and you will automatically "baby" it when you see the handle is a little too weak. So think about reinforcing this area with a double piece of leather and less stress on the inside rivets. Anyway, this is an awesome first or second effort and I am very proud of you. Welcome to the fraternity of cue case makers. Make sure you post these pictures to AZ Billiards. You will get some orders right away I am sure. Looking forward to seeing more, now I can steal ideas from you! :-) Note: For those of you that want to make a cue case. Cue cases have some special needs and get used/abused heartily. Pool cues are sensitive instruments that can cost upwards of $10,000. It's not easy to make cases that truly protect the multi-thousand dollar cues that go in them. But it is rewarding when you do blend all the elements and come up with a great looking and truly protective case.

Thank you. The more I think about it the more excited I am to at least try to come up with some natural dyes that we make. This is a website that appears to have some really good color information: http://www.pioneerthinking.com/naturaldyes.html and here is a supplier I found http://www.aurorasilk.com/natural_dyes/dyes/index.html again, I don't know any formulas yet as to what works and what doesn't but I guess that's part of the process to work it out. Edit: here is one with some recipes http://www.essortment.com/naturaldyeplan_rxll.htm I also want to ask if there is anything special about "leather" dye that I need to know. I know that we use solvent based and oil based dyes but I don't know why. Honestly, this is the deepest I have ever gone into tooling and dying leather. In my previous life we used 90% finished leather for our cases and the tooled lines we had were outsourced so that I had very little idea of the actual process. Now, I have to be keenly aware of our stock of colors because when I accept a custom order I need to be able to fill it.

Hi, Where I am it hard to get dyes. But where I am there is plenty of art supplies. So my question is how hard is it to make dyes for leather? Does anyone know how to do it from commonly available paints/pigments??? I found a few resources online for making dye in general but I don't know what kind of formula I should be looking at specifically for leather. We also have plenty of plants, flowers, and herbs available. :-) Especially tea which was mentioned as a good way to get brown. Any help appreciated. Thanks

Jim Murnak is located in New York. He is one of my colleagues in cue case making and he came to that from Archery quivers and holsters and general cases for things that shoot. http://www.fist-inc.com/

Hi all, I want to show off a case we just finished. It seems Kevin King is providing plenty of inspiration these days because he inspired me to design this case for a client. It's done in oil tan with hair-on-cow print inlays. I can't show it on my website yet because I have a policy of not making it public to the billiard world until the customer gets to hold it and check it out first and they are happy. But I just want to show it off. :-) So here it is.

I don't know but my friend Chas Clements used to charge quite a lot of his sheathes and get what he asked for. He once loaned me several knives and sheaths for a display and the total value of the knives was on the order of 5000+ and I didn't ask him the value of the sheaths. I guess the high end folks are in demand and the mid-range probably struggles a bit getting fair prices for their time. Kinda like making pool cues and pool cue cases I suppose :-)

Hi Marcel, I can't wait to see your first case. Get to it already :-)

Here is the link to their forum: http://bbs.leathercraft.cn/ I think that the assembly line shops here don't put out work that is very good. They basically take people off the street and teach them the basics of carving or stamping or whatever their "area" is going to be and that's what they do all day. I can only hope that some good leather workers have come out of that environment to found their own shops. Here is a not so good picture of a carved and embossed case we are about to finish. This is one of our toolers who has pretty much free license to design and explore.

In my industry we have a 400lb Gorilla that everyone loves to hate. The American Poolplayer's Association (APA). The APA has done more to bring the average person to pool than any other organization and maintains 260,000 members who play on a weekly basis. Still all the "diehards" love to denigrate the APA for everything from it's policies to the lower skill level of it's members. I can vividly remember getting a Tandy wallet kit with everything I needed to decorate and build it. I got several things like this during my childhood for birthdays and Christmases. If it weren't for those small inviting little Tandy stores then I doubt that many of us would have been introduced to leather crafting or the joy of making things with our hands. I wasn't aware that Tandy was a taboo topic in the leather crafter's world. Oh well, I always color outside the lines too.... And I haven't spent any time at the IFOLG(???) forum so I wouldn't know about the "Tandy" issue there either. To me TLF isn't trying to control the leather worker's industry - I could be wrong, wouldn't be the first time. To me they are a struggling chain of stores trying to survive in a world where it SEEMS as though most people consider hand work to be mastering a video game. To me they are the APA of leather working and provide all that a beginning through serious hobbyist needs to create nice things. But like any serious hobbyist and business owner knows, once you reach a certain stage you have to look around at what else is out there.

Update: I have added the AI - Adobe Illustrator Files to the ZIP File So now the file includes all the stamping tools from the Tandy Catalog in both CMX and AI format. That should be pretty good for most graphics programs. Here is is - Stamping Tools Zip File - click to download then open with your favorite unzip program.

Thanks Clay! That was exactly what I wanted. I don't know how I skipped over it many times in the links list???? John

Hi everyone, I am looking for a book called Advanced Stamping Patterns or something like that. I had the website before the crash but as it happens my computer tooka dive as well and I guess I didn't bookmark the site. I swear I found the website through the links page that used to be up on the front page of leatherworker.net but I am not so sure anymore. I was able to find a version of the links page here http://web.archive.org/web/20070629032120/...therworker.net/ but have NOT been able to find the website that sells the book. Any help would be greatly appreciated and will be paid for by heaps of good karma :-)

The veg tan comes from Australia, the USA, Brazil?, and from China. The leather for the one I pictured was imported but I don't know from where. The leather brokers here aren't too keen on providing a paper trail of where the leather comes from. :-) In China there seems to be several shops that are what I would call slash and burn tooling shops who take the patterns from Tandy books and throw them on wallets/purses and the like and try to move them for $30-100 on the Chinese version of Ebay. They generally employ around 20 people of which the tooling is spread out amongst them. - give you an example - I had one of these shops do a case for me and they took one stem pattern and just repeateded it 14 times on the case and then didn't even bother to get it even on any of the pieces - Then there are the individuals who do their own work, have their own shops and try to come up with innovative ways to tool. There are many of those as well and they have an active forum where they share their work and tutor each other. These are the folks I work with. I have seen some pretty cool stuff here but I wouldn't know if it was copied from someone else or not. The stuff I am showing you are things I haven't come across anywhere else. From what I understand Chinese tooling is largely influenced by the Taiwanese who have set up a few schools here to teach the art of western style tooling. There are books which refererence Chinese tooling on leather that was done entirely in China long ago but I have yet to find any modern practicioner of this style or any real life example thereof. I did find in a mall some carved leather goods from Northern China that had their own style to them. I didn't know enough Chinese to ask the seller if these were authentic local goods or products of a production shop somewhere. I guess the latter and am pretty sure the salesman would have told me the former. Anyway here are three of the pieces done in China that I found to be most interesting.

Hello from Xiamen China. My name is John Barton and I have been making cases since I was 12 years old. Since I was 22 I have been making pool cue cases. I started all by myself in Germany in a little attic room on the cue cases and graduated to a small company with annual production of several thousand leather cases a year. Sold it in 2003 and took a few years off. Now I live in China and work for a billiard supply company. My other business is again cue casemaking. I have a little shop and several talented toolers to do the decorative work. I thought you all might be interested to see some of our work and some of the work that some of the best Chinese toolers are doing. Here is our website www.jbcases.com All critique is welcome. Also, not to be defensive but you know how stereotypes go, these cases are not made in any kind of sweatshop environment. My workshop is in my apartment and the tooling is done by individuals who have their own shops and do their own tooling. I chose to live here because I can create products and get them made faster if I am a few hours away from the factories instead of a half a world away. For my cue cases I still make them the same way I did when I had that first little workshop in my German attic, individually, but with more individuals if you know what I mean. :-) Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to hire my first tooler to work with me permanently in my workshop. This will greatly increase our decorative capabilities. I don't do the tooling. I do design and make the cases though alongside my colleagues. Anyway, this is what we do, enjoy and thank you Johanna and Kate for maintaining such a wonderful resource. Hopefully I can be a contributer in some ways. John www.jbcases.com

I thought I tried to import the cmx to illustrator but I can't remember if remember it right - must be a sign of getting old (just turned 40) - I probably had converted some to AI. I am downloading a batch converter that I hope will work to convert the files to eps and ai - will post the results shortly No good on the batch conversion - tomorrow I will have one of our interns do it file by file and post the eps and ai files to the library page - very sorry for the misinformation on the cmx importing to Adobe Illustrator. John

All the Tandy Stores I have ever been to were staffed with knowledgable friendly people. I like buying from Tandy because of this.

Hi all, A while back we promised to share our digital stamping tools with you all if we did them. We did them. right here - www.jbcases.com/leathertools.html These are graphic representations of common stamping tools. We just did all the tools in Tandy's catalog to get started. The shaders and such probably won't be of much use - at least they haven't been to us yet. But the geometric elements have allowed us to come up with some nice patterns to tool. The images are all done to the size quoted in the Tandy catalog. If you use Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator, Xara or some other vector graphics program then you want the CMX files which can be imported to all those programs I mentioned. The direct link to download the zip file is here Leather Tools Zip or also on this page. CMX stands for Corel Exchange Format which is what Corel Cliparts are formated in. All I know is that .cmx files can be imported in any of the above programs. Do not resize the pictures in your drawings as they will not correspond to the actual size of the tool then. Unless of course you want to carve the shapes or patterns. Okay well that's enough words - hope these are useful to you all. John