Hello!
My name is Rudi and I am learning to make leather bicycle saddles.
My main interest is in biking and riding old bikes, and over the years I became frustrated that the quality of new leather saddles has gone down over the years and on one seemed to be putting new leather on them. So I decided to learn to do it myself. Those of you who peruse www.bikeforums.net may recognize my user name from there.
I've been doing this for over three years now, have made about 100 saddles. Mostly I've used sole bend leather from Springfield.
I've made a few stamps to use on the sides of saddles, like the ones shown above --the one on top is a reproduction of one from Italy from the 1950's or so, the other is my own design (based on an ancient Greek coin).
Recently I became interested in freehand embossing designs onto the leather. So here's my first attempt with that:
