Hello,
I am fairly new to leatherworking and have mostly been teaching myself through trial and error. I started by making single piece holsters for some of my revolvers and then moved on to two piece "high-ride" style holsters for automatics. I had been pretty happy with my beginner results and thus, with those few creations as my only experience, decided to move on to a more challenging project, a complete western style holster and belt rig. It wasn't long before I realized I was still lacking in some basic principles.
I started making 2 1/4" double layer belt out of two ~7oz strips that I cut with a strap cutter out of a double shoulder. The leather was the Crafstman Oak brand from Tandy. The straps were cut in the "left leg to right leg" direction. The resulting double strap was very thick, but not noticeably more than some of the other professionally made belt rigs that I had on hand. I dyed the strips with Fieblings Oil based dye in saddle tan. My intention was to leave the inside strap natural, but after dripping some dye on both pieces I elected to dye them both, possibly part of my error. I glued the two together using ECO-FLO leathercraft cement and set let it set overnight under a weighted down board. The following day I removed the piece and bent it around my waist. While doing so the inside leather piece instantly formed wrinkles.
It was permanently damaged, as if the epidermis pulled away from the rest of the skin. I went on to make some smaller test pieces using some different techniques. Some with both layers dyed, some natural on the inside, some with the leather cement, some with contact cement...In the end they all showed some deforemation of the inside layer. The dyed ones were worse, but even the natural leather showed some wrinkling, certainly more than on any of my purchased double layer belts, which can be bent fairly tight without any effects. As you can see in the photo, I stubornly went ahead and punched holes for stiching, but stopped before completing because it looked too bad and was getting worse the more I moved it.
What am I missing? Is it the leather? Is there much difference in the budget stuff that tandy sells vs something more expensive? Did this cow have low collagen? I found a few posts of similiar issues. This one it was led me to this forum: http://leatherworker.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=51994 which is on a single piece of leather, and didn't seem to have much resolution. Once I made an account here I did some further searching and found this post: http://leatherworker.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=62389&hl=wrinkles which looks similar, however the consensus here was that it was cut from a belly piece, and mine is from a shoulder. I suppose they could both be cases of bad leather, but before I spend money on something new I want to make sure I am not doing something incorrectly or not doing something at all.
Any direction y'all can give would be appreciated. Thanks a lot.
