JohnBarton

Nothing says Texas bettern' a travel bag with a holster. :-) Beautiful work there Casey.

It's a dragon. One of the many things that make Silva Fox such an astounding artist. The other amazing thing to me is the way the flight path of the dragon is depicted - she left the leather untooled to allow the dragon's wake to cut through the sky, just amazing foresight and detail. Thanks Clay, all of these pictures are just fantastic and inspirational. Amazing work all the way around and your friend is lucky to own that Fox. I don't collect much but she is on my list of "must have something by someday". John

It's a dragon. One of the many things that make Silva Fox such an astounding artist. The other amazing thing to me is the way the flight path of the dragon is depicted - she left the leather untooled to allow the dragon's wake to cut through the sky, just amazing foresight and detail. Thanks Clay, all of these pictures are just fantastic and inspirational. Amazing work all the way around and your friend is lucky to own that Fox. I don't collect much but she is on my list of "must have something by someday". John

When I lived in Germany we had a tattoo artist who would do airbrushing on our leather cue cases. She did a fantastic job. She had a certain paint that she would use that adhered to the leather well and was scratch resistant. She did a lot of biker vests and jackets as well. Nice work that you do, welcome to LW!

Quick update: I visited Amy's place today and the folks there were very nice. They have a process that prints directly onto the leather and it's very durable. I compared two wallets one made of chrome tanned nappa and the other made of vinyl and you could definitely tell that the leather one was much better, it still felt like leather, soft and supple. I didn't get too much into the exact process as I didn't want to pry. Essentially they are capable of printing anything onto a leather or vinyl substrate it seems. I am going to give them some sample pieces of veg tan, nappa, suede, etc... dark, light, and so on to see how well they do. This is not for the small leather worker though. They do volume production starting at 500 units. I'd say that if you are looking to do a pretty cool leather thingy - like a key fob, football, soccer ball, etc... in volume and with a full color super durable image then these are the folks you want doing it. I don't know who else is in this business besides Rubo but these guys have it down. It's definitely well beyond what 2Shews is doing with the Plaid stuff. That said this technique does leave the product with a professional "factory" feel. I am sure that one can design images to evoke more of the handmade feeling but I doubt that this will ever give someone the same impression as a 2shews style piece. If Rubo's stuff is as good or better then it's a good way to go for someone who needs and wants images printed on leather. I am going to be curious to see how well it works on veg tan and what can be done to it afterward.

Hello Dave, I think that you will find many artists here who do a lot of stuff that isn't floral. Doing tattoo art on leather is a great combination because you can add physical depth to your pieces and bring them life in ways you can't using just ink and skin. Welcome to the board and please show off your stuff in the Show Off section. Here is a case we did using the customer's body art www.jbcases.com/doc.html If you want to see how we apply some flash to cowskin. :-)

I can tell you that being able to draw your own images will be a HUGE help to you as a leather worker. I can't draw. At least not in any way that anyone would ever describe as artistic. I can barely bring my ideas to paper in any way that someone else besides me can follow what I am trying to convey.

Marcel, You are one of the brightest stars in the cue case making business. We already talked about the details of this case so no need to go over them here. Sweet case man! Good job.

I am so lazy. I hate to design my cases sometimes. My head is swimming with ideas but I rarely draw them out. I have created templates and line drawings on Corel Draw for all my cases and just about every part for all the cases and still I hate to design. It's like I have all the templates and tools created over the last fifteen years but sometimes I don't want to spend the time to arrange them together to build a sketch (can I even call it a sketch when I do it on the computer with shapes?). Here is my fundamental problem. Disorganization. A customer will contact me and then we will exchange emails, have some chats through IM, maybe a phone call or two and then when it comes time for me to draw out his/her case I have to pore over all of our emails and chats and find my handwritten notes so as to make sure I don't miss any details. And often I do miss a detail - even when it's right there staring at me. I think I am going to just go all the way back to the beginning of my career in case making. Back then 18 years ago I hand drew a form with little sketches of each type of pocket we offered and a blank case form in the center of the page. Down one side I had all the specs listed where I could write those in. At the top was the customer's information. Would you believe that I have made a few custom case in the past several months and NOT known the customer's full name or their address? And they paid me in advance using someone else's account, wife/father etc.... Sometimes I just find it to be too cumbersome to design using the computer as stupid as that sounds because I have all the tools one could want. For most cases it pretty much drag and drop at this point but I think I'd rather get back to drawing by hand. I guess another way to put it is that I think I feel more connected when I draw it by hand. Anyone else feeling this way about the things you design?

I have been struggling with whether I want to sell the tubes with liners or not. Recently I sold 20 pieces to a new case maker because he is struggling to get his orders done. I did cases with individual tubes for 20 years and we continue to offer them today. It's much easier to do a case with one large extruded tube for several reasons but also somewhat harder on several aspects. So it's pretty much a wash. I find that it's just a chore to do lined tubes and for some reason some case makers don't like to do it. What I have always done is spend time preparing a lot of tubes at once. For example liners can be sewn in a daisy chain one right after the other. You can go to any seamstress and have them do hundreds of liners fairly cheap if you don't want to do them yourself. Preparing the tubes is a chore but again do it in an assembly line fashion and do up enough for five or ten cases out and then it's not such a hassle on a per case basis. The good thing about doing cases with individual tubes is that the tubes are always readily available at the hardware store. Doing cases with extruded tubes requires having molds made for different sizes, figuring out which plastic to use, buying the minimums at least, and doing complicated liners if you want then to be padded and durable. Jack buys his from an overseas case maker who already was making them for their cases. We make our own. If I were not in the position I am in now where I can get molds done fairly cheaply and have fairly low minimums then I would not be using extruded tubes. As to which is better, well for me it's pretty much even but I use tubes that are stronger so that the end result is the same as if I were using individual tubes. I think it's one of those things where you have to charge what you want to get and not worry about what others are charging. You'll find out if you are out of line in the customer's eyes when they comment on it. Breaking into a market however often requires some sacrifice whether it be profit or time. You don't always have to offer a lower price though - you can offer something else like free personalization up to three initials or be more flexible. For example there are case makers who won't change the side of the case that they put the handle and strap on. So by offering that for free or for a small fee you are one up on them in at least that respect. I will tell you both this. I look at a case in terms of what would I be willing to pay for it if I were the customer. Even though I use a formula to price our work I still look at each case we do and ask myself if I would buy it at that price. If my answer is yes then I feel it's a good price. Forget about repuation and hype and brand name. If you were looking at the case purely in terms of the product itself would you pay what you are asking? Would you pay more? If you think that you would pay more then ask for more. Why would you give up your work for less than you would pay for it? I sincerely believe that if one follows this principle that the product you make will always be priced right for you and for the customer. I never want a customer to walk away from buying a case rubbing their butt feeling like they got screwed. Nor do I want them to feel that what they bought is "cheap". I like it when they feel that it's a bargain and wise investment. Ok enough. Back to work for me.

Your composition looks good. I would try to sharpen up the angles on the box pockets, the sides are bulging a bit. Unless that's how you want them to be. From a decorative standpoint I don't feel like the front and back match because of the stamped barbwire oval on the back and the straight rows on the front. That's an aesthetic thing though and probably doesn't bother anyone but me. Edges is the other thing. As has been mentioned Bob's tutorial on edging is the nuts. Since reading it I took an old pool cue and cut off the forearm above the wrap and made us a maple burnisher. I use it three ways now, by hand with just spit and/or gum traganth, attached to a drill, or attached to our drill press. I also use Bob's method of attaching canvas to it depending on how I want to finish the edges. Edge finishing really adds the final touch that says class and care. It also prevents the fibers from fuzzing up and becoming unsightly or nuisances. I am not a real big fan of the leather patch method of doing names. To me it seems somewhat cheap like it's an afterthought. I guess Jack kind of pioneered it on cue cases but you rarely see this method of personalizing on any other leather goods. I have always felt that on of the great things about doing leather cases is the ability to carve right into the leather and so I personally eschew the patch method unless there is a damn good reason. And for me "customer request" isn't good enough. I might do an overlay if for example the rest of the case were nappa leather and this was the only way to put on a carved name. I think Jack does it primarily because he can't put the whole case sized piece in the laser. Not sure about that - just guessing based on my own experience with our lasers. My advice would be to do make the patch look a little nicer than just a rectangle. Give it a little more flair somehow if you are going to do them like this. Now, having said this I do find instances where a "patch" or overlay is appropriate. Recently we did a bunch of Pirate themed leather cases and I chose deliberately to do a waving pirate flag on the pocket as an overlay because I wanted it to stand out as the highest point on the front of the case. So it's a judgement call. Otherwise, your cases are coming along great. For pricing I don't know that I quite agree that Jack is charging the right prices. I think it's more each to his own according to their own sense of what they need and want. I charge based on a formula that is essentially cost of materials plus time plus a little for the design time with no regard for all the other brain cell usage involved in the extra back and forth to get a case order finalized. Our cases come out on average cheaper than Jack's one the ones that could even be compared but it's what I want to charge and what works for us. Pricing will always be a sticky issue and we had a long interesting thread here about it with some really great information in it (besides my posts which were boring). We charge $50 less for the amount of stamping we do that is roughly similar to what you did on this case. $400 ($325 plus $75 shipping) $350 ($275 plus $75 shipping) Well that's my critique. Welcome again to the board and to the cue case maker club. John

That's really cool - my best tooler Zhen Hai is also a tattoo artist and I asked him if he ever did tats on leather and he said it didn't work. Now I am going to show him that SOMEONE made it work and see what he says now. :-)

Hello Amy, I live in Xiamen and will try to visit your office next week. I am very much interested in this process for our production and custom cases. John P.S. For Rubo: I'd check out your service too but the logistics don't work for me - your stuff looks really hot!

Hey Jay, Welcome to the forum - good to see you over here. I am sure your carved case is going to be out of this world. Nice work on the tat. Gonna try it now.

Hi, I am looking for where to buy the Picture This transfer medium as shown in Billy 2Shews video. I was in Sante Fe NM, one of the art centers of the world for a few days a couple weeks ago and I tried Wal-Mart, Joanne's Fabrics, Hobby Lobby, and Tandy and none had it. Only the guy at Tandy knew of it. On Plaid's website they list their dealers but I presume that is dealers of any of their products. Does anyone have an alternative method of transferring images to leather that works as well? Thanks in advance, John

My pleasure. I love it here. Every time I think I have seen it all I am BLOWN AWAY by something someone did whether it's making a leather something, or a new tool or technique. The sawhorse idea is great - that's all anyone really needs. For me all I want is that it doesn't move and I can work on it. Just the other day I suspended an iron bar between two sewing machines just to be able to do a tricky rivet installation on a small diameter case. The iron bar was set on foam rubber and towels to keep it from moving or damaging the sewing machines. The only thing I caution with using pipe is to make sure that it's strong enough not to bed when you are setting rivets. You would be surprised to know that fairly sturdy feeling pipe can bend with what seems like relatively light tapping.

Well, if you are able to have this attitude and sell everything you make for whatever price you choose to then this is the final word on pricing: From a cue maker on my other board in response to a thread complaining about him being hard to get a hold of. "Please take me seriously when I tell you, I don't care. I don't come on to AZ much anymore & when I do, it can be for whatever purpose I choose. If I want to enjoy the forum & read through all the news, that's what i'm going to do. Sometimes I get tired of the nagging & nit-picking, so I do not even bother to open my PM's. Nobody is going to even begin to control me by micromanaging my time & keeping track of when I visit the site. Again, I don't care. I'll do what I want, when I want, with no permission needed. Sugartree is my gig, not yours. If you don't like it, don't work so hard at involving yourself with it. No harm, no foul. Have a nice life. It's just a piece of wood for crying out loud. I build what I want, when I want, & for whom I want. I don't advertise or try pushing my cues. I don't ask anybody to buy my cues. So if you are wanting a cue directly from me, you are thereby stepping into my world & in my world, it's my way. Who do you think you are getting upset & calling me out in a public forum when things don't go your way? Exactly where in the big scheme of my life do you feel you fit? Really? Let me be very clear about things. If you don't like me or my outlook on cuemaking, then don't try getting a cue from me. It makes no difference to me. There's no reason to be foul & offensive. There's no reason to begin assuming wild ideas of why I do things the way I do. If you want to vent about things not working out the way you wanted, then fine. But understand it's you who chased me asking for a piece of my time, a piece of my work. I never sought you out to hassle for a sale & you never seen an advertisment of mine where I was advertising that I wanted to work for you. So keep things realistic & put your feet on the ground before you begin pointing fingers. Understand that my words are not foul intended. I'm simply telling you who I am & how I see the situation. I stand behind my work 100%. I will repair a cue that has a flaw, given that it's my fault & not the result of abuse or tampering by somebody else. I love my cues, regardless of how I feel about who owns them." If you can get to this level or have a REALLY GOOD and SECURE day job then you won't need to worry about pricing. :-)

I want to expand on this point a little and add that I don't mind sending someone to the competition when it's in "my" best interest. Sometimes I get someone that is downright hard to deal with and while normally I view such customers as opportunities to make loyal customers out of them once in while there is that one that just rubs you the wrong way. I don't mind giving those people a detailed map to my competition's shop. :-)

This is so true. I use this all the time to reward customers for their patience. I will also use it instead of giving a discount when someone wants to bargain with me. I grew up in the flea market so none of my prices are set in stone although they are glued down pretty good. I like to bargain sometimes and I don't mind if someone does it with me as long as they are not way out of line. I'd rather always do a little extra though rather than give money away. For one of my recent customers I tooled the inside of the pocket and the inside of the lid. I know every time he opens that pocket and lid he will think of the pleasant surprise he got. And I get the gratification of seeing some of my colleagues following suit :-) (of course I borrowed the idea from Peter Main - hopefully Peter I can return the favor someday by doing something you think worthy of borrowing.) Sometimes it's the little things that make such a big difference in your own satisfaction with a job well done but also in cementing a good relationship with your customer. I also want to add something to what Bree said about not underpricing your work. Basically I have found that when you work cheap you tend to be sloppier and then if something goes wrong, whether you have to redo some parts before it goes to the customer, or worse after it's gone to the customer and they bring it back, then you have no room financially to cover that loss. The saying goes "if you don't have the time to do it right the first time then where are you going to find the time to do it right the second time?" I tell you what, I would rather give a piece away than work my ass off on it for less than I would get at McDonalds. Lastly, if you make it a habit of dropping your prices to get business then the customers don't respect your or value your work. In my opinion that is.

Thanks. I don't actually know how much traffic I get on www.jbcases.com. I haven't tried to optimize that site at outside of the site itself. Judging by the amount of inquiries I get for custom cases 1-2 a day with conversion of about 1-2 a week I'd guess that it's getting decent traffic. I have checked my placement from time to time on certain keywords that are important to me and we are coming up on page one or two for most of them so that works. I am not sure what terms you think I could be better optimized for on my site but I am open to suggestion. I see a couple generic ones where I should change my text a little bit to have a better shot at those. I agree with you that I should do a lot more on JB Cases to optimize it but I really have done what amounts to the barest amount of SEO a person could do short of just putting up a blank page. Most of my customers come from AZ Billiards where I do most of my marketing. My comments about SEO weren't supposed to indicate that I am an SEO expert. I am not. I did a lot of studying of the subject a year and a half ago and regularly read the blogs to stay somewhat abreast of the topic. This was in preparation for trying to get an office together here to help my employer get his websites better optimized. But I found that the Chinese website developers have very little understanding of SEO and the ones that do have some are way into blackhat stuff that I couldn't allow any of our top ranked websites to be involved in lest they be sand boxed. To me SEO is somewhat of a black art anyway. I feel that one could truly do it with a certain amount of success if one were able to constantly run experiments to see what is working and what is not. For JB Cases I need to definitely do some work on it but for now I am letting it develop naturally and just build some history. I'd definitely recommend to everyone here that you form some sort of a co-op - perhaps under Johanna's umbrella and pay someone to do some serious SEO on an online marketplace. Get that page on top for all the best leather goods related keywords and you all will see some real revenue rolling in. I would take a small share of that since my particular goods are very specialized. Again, thanks for looking at Jb Cases. If you freelance send me your rates to jb@jbideas.com - I might have some other business for you working on some of our other existing websites and our upcoming projects. John

Little SEO info; LeatherWorker.net isn't likely to come up on the first page for super popular search terms like "Leather handbags" but it is absolutely PERFECT for what people call the long tail of marketing which is when people put in obscure terms like "leather blackberry case that fits on a saddle" - Maybe LW doesn't come up on the first page but maybe page two or three and suddenly someone is browsing through LW and finds a few websites they want to look at for custom leather goods. Ecommerce on the web is ALL ABOUT page one in google. However there are a lot of businesses that are benefiting from the "long tail" just by virtue of the sheer amount of content that is on the site and cataloged by google. I personally find the idea of a virtual leather emporium to be great. I think that there is plenty of space online for two of them. I think that if they both link to each other it will give them both a little link-juice and help them in the rankings (although some folks feel that cross-linking cancels out the link love - fine, link to me in the middle then :-) Link Juice is the bit of "authority" that Google says defines a site when another site thinks it's worth linking to. So in theory if 100 sites link to one then that one must be important. Of course like everything else in this world it has been abused so that links from low ranked sites or "link-farms" carry little to no Link Juice. I am totally down for seeing my product on some high visibility sites. If you have a Page Rank 5 or better site and you want to show off my product for a percentage of sales then tell me what to do. I'd really like to get some link love too. Going to fill out my profile now. :-)

:-) We already do that. I guess I should have clarified that this tip is for places that don't fit in the sewing machine for whatever reason. On our cue cases we have several areas that need to be hand sewn and due to the complexity of these particular places or parts we have found that pre-punching the holes using the sewing machine on both parts leads to the holes and parts not lining up right later. So we went to assembling the parts using glue and clamps and then punching the holes using the drill/needle setup and it works great.

Hi, Just thought I'd share a tip from our shop. We often make our stitch holes using a leather needle from the sewing machine which is shaped like an awl inserted into a drill. This works well as we can set the needle point exactly where the hole should be and it makes a precise and neat and small hole without taking out excess leather. We used to use a drill bit - I know, it's not traditional and there is hot debate on the morals of using a drill bit to make sewing holes. :-) The problem we had with the drill bits were that even the smallest was too big in our opinion and if we slipped when setting the bit and pulling the trigger then the drill bit would ruin the piece. I am sure someone has already posted this technique but on the off chance that it hasn't been here it is. Drill plus leather needle - easy holes.

Sure as soon as I can get to it I will take a picture. I stole the idea from one of the factories I work with. It's a beast though because it requires a fairly large and heavy base to be freestanding and work well. I'd bet that this will be too big and overkill for what your needs are. Phillip, the best advice I can give you is test test test. Whenever you have an idea to put pieces of leather together and you don't know what it will do then make a mockup. I have an entire wall of mockups. Some of the ideas turned out not to be practical and others have led to really nice breakthroughs in the way we build cue cases. As well we are often further inspired with even more ideas once we build a mockup. For some reason seeing something made real seems to lead to a quick succession of good ideas on how to make it better. As to the butting of leather ends together, yes on a curve the ends will stick up unless you do something to keep them down. Even when they are not on a curve you don't want leather butting end to end as it often happens that the ends are not the same thickness through the length of a large piece. Believe me when I tell you that finding a way for leather to easily butt end to end and lay down is the leather worker's holy grail. About the only way I have seen it done is by using a curved awl and needle and sewing the ends together through the center of the leather. I cannot imagine how time consuming and frustrating that must be. That said we are still gonna try it because when it's done right it looks pretty killer. I still think that even this technique though will not allow the leather to lay down on the curve.

Also I want to add that we need to distinguish between a pattern and a template. A pattern is the blue print for a part. Depending on what it's made of it can also act as a template. A template is something that I use to cut parts or set the proper spacing. We make a lot of templates out of wood and heavy plastic sheeting and use those to cut parts without having to mark the leather first. Patterns are generally used for marking the material prior to cutting it. Using a template you can just cut the material without marking it first. One of the factories I work with uses some metal templates with handles. They lay it down on the leather and run the razor around it and cut a perfect part every time. Beyond that they always have cutting dies for cutting parts on the clicker press. I have seen them use the cutting dies as a manual template for both marking and cutting.