JohnBarton

The Good: This is your best piece yet in my opinion. Simply great. Wonderful layout and attention to detail. Superb craftsmanship and going the extra mile on construction. The blind seam is one of the hardest things to do in cue cases and you did a great job with it. The Bad: We didn't make it :-) Really. Top shelf Rusty. This is the first case I have seen of yours where I can honestly say that I wouldn't have done a thing differently. You're there man. You're there.

I like doing custom work because it gives me a chance to play and explore new things and ways to do things. On this case Chris wanted his signature, but very subdued, so we chose to tool it and inlay it in a circle matched to the radius of the middle pocket. Middle pocket? Well, Chris also wanted a pocket for his joint protectors so we added a small one with a magnetic flap and an expandable center section so the pieces can be inserted and removed easily. And a matching towel ring, of course :-) We did a luggage tag, as requested, never knew those were so popular. For the logo we inlaid it on the back of the lid to match the inlaid signature on the front. Chris also wanted it to be the oil tan combined with a rustic brown that was only a few shades apart. Took us a couple tries but we got there. Oh, I almost forgot, we also made a custom plug that is easily removable for Chris' jump cue handle, and put in an extra divider in one of the butt compartments so that Chris can put both the butt and shaft of his break cue in the same compartment. Look closely at the left compartment of the interior. This is for the pool players on the board. Lastly he wanted something to keep the strap in place when it was not extended, so we did a little retainer with a snap. Chris didn't opt for the lojack system :-) Thanks for the order Chris - I appreciate the business AND the challenge. This case came out very pretty and is another one that I would make for myself someday when I get around to making one for myself.

Careful painting. The only way to do this is to dye it with a paint brush and a steady hand. Well it might not be the only way but it's the way that we have found works best. I'd recommend getting Paul Burnett's book on coloring leather - available as a digital download here AND Peter Main's (which I still have to order). Between those two and the excellent resources available to you here through the forum post by other highly skilled members you should have all the info you need to do anything to leatehr regarding color.

We use wood end caps covered in leather. We glue these in and use barbed upholstery nails to keep the leather tight to the wood. We use a laser to cut the wood to fit. Before we had the laser we would use the jigsaw and sand to fit.

The word WOW is completely inadequate to describe these two pieces. I try to avoid combining red and black and white because I never feel that I can put those three colors together in a good way and you NAILED it. Amazing work. Thank you for sharing.

Thought you all might want to see what we do for fun.

I can't recommend Universal highly enough for anyone considering a laser engraver. We bought ours more than three years ago and it's been worked hard and is still going strong. I put in about 200 hours on it when we got it. The customer service has been perfect. As for making craftaids, tapoffs, embossing plates, jigs, cutting custom parts, rapid prototyping, cutting patterns, making stamps, oh and also laser engraving...... the laser is the most versatile tool in our shop. We make so many things using the laser that it's just about indispensable at this point. In our USA shop we run the Universal and in the Chinese shop we run a generic Chinese laser. For those of you considering using a laser try this - look around and see if there is a machine shop co-op near you. I have found out recently that a lot of these have laser engravers that anyone can use.

Now we are up to seven. All the work is done in-house. It depends on the leather used and how many layers are on it. This one using 8oz came in at around 12lbs. Normally the cases are 4-7lbs. The customer insisted on 8oz or better and so we did it. Thank you everyone.

This is a fantastic case. The one thing I can't stand about any type of cell phone cases and especially the Iphone cases is the way that many of them are so bulky. The whole point of the Iphone is being slim and this case stays true to that idea. Great execution - I am jealous. :-)

Made for a lawman in California. The important part: UltraPad Interior - if you want to make a cue case then be sure it's first ultra protective of the cue. Build pretty around that. Custom Cueball Holder: Closeups: On JB Cases all the stress points are reinforced due to the nature of having a long thin case which gets caught in awkward postitions. This case in particular has metal pieces under the leather that are riveted to metal bracers on the inside of the case. The outside cover piece is then hand sewn through the body to add strength and provide a metal free look.

Storm,' You tooling is really looking great!!!! Thanks for sharing.

Well, it's a fitting end to this thread that I came across this today while browsing some of the links on the LW homepage. It's from this great site: A Sailor's Leather He did the same thing I did - butt two ends together - do a simple criss-cross lace AND blend the strap holder into the seam. :-) Nothing new under the sun when it comes to leather working. Check out the website - Opel Mok is a pretty prolific leather worker with a LOT of interesting stuff and a killer collection of self-made tools. And he gives credit for where he got his ideas! So, with that I am done with this ego-trip, time to get back home and make something. Thanks again everyone for the discussion. P.S. In case anyone is interested I skived the leather so that the two ends interlock and the seam line is not actually two pieces end to end but instead is two pieces overlapping so that the leather will lay down over the curve on the side of the plastic tube.

To be perfectly clear I was in no way suggesting that banks should eat fraudulent checks and money orders. I do find it way over the top however to CHARGE their customer $25/35/50 etc.... when the person who is depositing the check does not have the bank's resources to verify authenticity. The bank SHOULD have a clearance time frame in which they verify the authenticity and when the BANK has verified it then the funds are good and they STAY good. That's my only point as someone who has been in business for himself for 20 years. It is not right and not fair to make the presenter of the check liable for up to year for the face value of the check. It is not right to assess high fees to the presenter for the type of transactions that cost the bank pennies to process. Let's use another example. Imagine that you had a counterfeit $20 bill which you didn't know it's counterfeit. You take it to the bank along with ten other 20s and deposit it. The bank teller runs all the 20s through the detector and it spits out the fake. So then she keeps the fake and deducts $40 from your legitimate $200 worth of deposits as a "fee" for handling no-value monetary paper. Would you accept that? If so then I want to be your bank. The way our financial system works it's ALL GEARED to put all the risk on the seller with the bank taking no responsibility but charging all the fees. Of course when I take a check from someone I am taking the risk. However when I give it to my bank and my bank says it's good then I have to trust that my bank has done whatever they are supposed to do to talk to the other bank and transfer the money to my account. AT THAT POINT there should be no more question. That's my only point.

Live by the sword die by the sword. If you want the power of the net to get business then you have to contend with the fact that your competitors can use your pictures and descriptions to copy you. I too think that the JB Innovations page is the best idea. Now I am afraid that when I get around to listing them they may not seem quite as "important" as my ego wants me to believe. :-)

I haven't had my fingers discolored either when using vinegaroon. My unfinished wood desk however has lots of little grey spots on it though. The other day I made black leather buttons for my jacket and I decided not to neutralize them using baking soda. I wanted them harden up and they did. So far so good. We will see what happens the first time I wash it. My VG solution is made of steel wool and rice vinegar.

I have that feeling every week when I send the cases out. I have to wait until the last minute to put some of them into the box. Nice work again as always!

I kind of hope and expect people to use what I show them on this site. It's sort of a validation that I am doing something right. I do hope that whoever does it would give me some credit though if they take something they saw me do first. I don't consider it stealing when you give your ideas away. And when I see things on this site I consider them as shared with the idea that any of us can try the things done by others. Now, this isn't to say that any of us should go and copy someone's products verbatim and start a business selling "knockoffs" of what we see here. I am specifically talking about taking someone's idea and seeing what you can do with it, can you do it as well, better? In that sense we are all here to learn and teach. I know that I am better off having a community like this here to talk about the craft. I think it's polite to give credit if you try something you get from someone else and then show it off here. Stealing to me would be be something like if I went and copied Bearman's mauls and put them up for sale. I have seen a few folks make their own based on his design and to me that's perfectly fine and in the spirit of the community. Well anyway, I think that most everyone kind of "knows" what is right and wrong along these lines.

I think that this is a good idea. Too often these things are buried within a product description here and there or inside a discussion. A page highlighting them would do a couple things. One is that it would assign credit to me or our shop for the things that I believe we created first or significantly improved on. Two is that it would give people a place to see what it is I claim and use it as a reference to show me earlier examples or similar examples of the same technique. Three, it's also a place to GIVE credit for the things we took from others and point people in their direction. And four it's a platform to discuss the art of cue case making as a subset of case making in general. I am not trying to build a legend but I'd like to preserve a little bit of what's ours because we do work hard at doing things differently. If I wanted to think of it as purely financial then one could equate reputation with money and say that the better rep a person/business has then more business they are likely to get. Of course that's theory and the real reason here is simply to take credit where none is given. In today's world people are apt to take really fast because it's so easy to see some pictures on the net of something someone else did and duplicate that item without a second thought as to the work the other person put into developing it. Especially with the Internet. Even if you tries to keep your work off the net there will always be others who want to show it and highlight it (hopefully, right?). So my philosophy here is take credit and share sources and discuss and let the readers do their own research. If I do it this way at least I don't have to worry about someone coming across my site second and thinking I copied the person they found first.

It depends on how you want to look at it. I don't ride horses. I don't build saddles. I make cue cases designed to protect thousand dollar pool cues. Horses cost a lot of money, they are living sentinent beings that require love and care and give love back. People are priceless (most of them), accidents to people are often expensive and traumatic. Horses are powerful creatures. So it seems to me that when you are considering what you will sit on while riding this powerful creature that you love you will want the best piece of equipment you can find that is both comfortable for the horse and for you and safe for you both. Most of the saddle makers here are horse people from what I can tell. They are the sort who eat their own cooking and wouldn't make for you any less than they would do for themselves. In my line of work there are cue cases made by people who don't know the first thing about $1000 cues and don't care. And predictably, those cases often fall far short of the sort of protection a fine instrument like a pool cue needs to have. My question is this, if you don't know much about saddles and you are asking if a Mexican made saddle is any good then why don't you go with a trusted saddle maker here who knows his stuff? I understand that the price may be attractive but when you consider the cost of potential equipment failure maybe the bargain isn't so good.

Thanks for the response. I am sure that people have laced connectors into goods before. Just not in the exact way I did it with the exact shape. I also didn't do it with the idea that it would be some revolutionary idea. I just was flattered when the other case maker took it and wanted a little credit because it obviously came from me. I don't know if Peter Main was the first guy to do swivel knife accents on the back of belts. But since he is the first one I came across who did it I gave him credit for the inspiration to do something similar with swivel knife highlights on the inside rim of one of our cases. I learned long ago when I tried to see if I could protect our designs that it's a fruitless endeavor 99% of the time. You can't copyright an item that has a "use". You can get a design patent which is nearly worthless and costly to defend. If you do get one you can SOMETIMES intimidate some infringers with it but most of the time they know that you can't do anything to them. I am on both sides of the fence here as well because I do frequently use ideas from others. I have no compunction about taking someone else's good idea and figuring out how to use it. Many times I see people do things that I thought of or sketched out years ago and never got around to doing. I think that most of us who build things have had that happen sometimes. It's inevitable that people hit on the same ideas independently when working in the same field. I agree wholeheartedly about the whole thing just making you tired. I used to get so down when I went to an event and I would see three or four other vendors with knockoffs of my best designs. It was hard to have people come up and tell me that they could get "the same case for half the price" down the row. Now, it's not a big deal because almost all of my cases are unique and I am not dependent on dealers or mass production. I suppose in some way I am providing R&D and templates for the knockoff artists but as you said it comes with the territory these days. I will leave you with a story that I think you might appreciate more than most here. Once in 1992 I had a woman come to my office in Germany who represented a billiard supplies trading company in China. I knew her from the trade shows and she was actually visiting one of her clients in the same town and decided to look me up. We had no business together at all other than exchanging cards once. So she is in my office and we are making small talk and she asked me which of our cases is the best seller. I knew instantly what she was after so I said that the pink and blue vinyl ones were the hottest ones. I said we can't keep them in stock. So the visit concluded and she left. Fast forward two months and I am at the trade show in the USA and I walk up to her booth and what do I see.......you guessed it a whole row of pink and blue cases prominently displayed. She is obviously embarrassed but I play it off and ask her how the sales of them are going. She says that they aren't doing so well and that no one has placed any orders. I said, "oh, I forgot to tell you that these are only popular in Germany. The Americans hate them."

In the credits the car was listed as a Renault. I thought Beetle at first too but something was off. I bet it's a Renault knockoff of the beetle. I have never seen one before and of course the first one happens to be covered in leather. Check out the guy's website - www.suncoastleather.com He took a whole gator and covered a motorcycle with it. He has some pretty wild leather projects there and on youtube.

Not mine but since I was on the topic of all the things you can do with leather - here is a guy who covered a car in leather. LEATHER CAR I didn't know where to put it so mods feel free to move it where appropriate. Other than that there are any number of interesting videos on YouTube and Google Video about leather and leather craft. Johanna, do you think a videos section would be good where we can post links to online videos we make or find?

Why do I always have to be right? It's a compulsion...... nah, it's just my opinion on what I like to see. If you go back through our cases you'll see plenty of designs where we covered up the tooling too so I am trying to break us of that habit as well. Jim Murnak says it makes the tooled leather look like fabric when the tooling runs all around the piece without defined space. I feel like his view on it has a lot of merit. He said that tooling should look deliberately planned. I agree with that as it's something we do have full control over. That said, yours rocks NO MATTER HOW YOU DO IT!! I know that on here there is the ever running debate on whether to drill the holes or use an awl to punch them. I think that when you start going through leather that thick it makes more sense to drill. We put a needle in our drill and use that to make the holes. So maybe that sort of acts like a cross between an awl and a drill bit. It's still a pain to stitch through 12mm of leather but at least we don't have to punch the holes by hand as well.

I agree. I decided yesterday to play with it and today bought a bottle of rice vinegar and some steel wool. I didn't burn the steel wool - just threw it in the vinegar this afternoon and let it sit in the sun. Just now, about four hours later I dipped some leather in it and the leather turned dark grey. Dipped it again and the leather turned black. I can only imagine how well this stuff works when the mixture is cured and strong.

Well there are both legal and moral issues here. A. The person using the picture without permission is violating copyright law unless that picture is somehow part of the public domain and copyright free. The person who owns the image is the one who gets to determine how it is used in commercial settings. It is legal to use images in a comparative way and also for parody. It is illegal to use images without permission to sell products. B. Morally it's just wrong to rip off someone's property. C. It's fraudulent to post a picture of a product you didn't make and say that it's your product. I am pretty sure if I posted a picture of a Mercedes without the star visible and then delivered a kit car both Mercedes and the customers would have the law after me. I used to have people ripping off my pictures AND my copy (product descriptions, testimonials, etc...) and selling on Ebay, putting them in catalogs and on websites when they were selling knockoffs. I had to fight that fight with cease and desist letters every month or so for years. It sucks. But it's part of life on the net. As easy as it is for us to advertise to the world it's just as easy for scumbags to rip us off and pretend to be more than they are.