fredk

Carnuba adds hardness to any wax mixture. Too much can make the finish brittle and flakey when it has dried. Car waxes have a large amount of carnuba in them but car bodies ain't supposed to bend or flex like a belt or a tote-bag edited to answer one of your other questions; I use my soft wax on the flesh side of belts. It soaks right in and just a little buffing with a polishing brush gives it a modest shine and smoothness. On the outside of belts and bags I apply resolene first then my hard wax. It takes a bit more effort to buff up using a scrap of linen, denim or a stiff polishing brush. The heat generated by the buffing in both is enough to melt the mix into the leather. I've never yet used a heat scource on them on applying to the leather. Just in winter I need to warm the hard mix to soften it enough to use.

my soft wax is sort of about 45% NFO, 45% beeswax, 10% olive oil My hard wax is roughly the same but about 10% carnuba added I don't measure precisely, its, umm, sort of dumped into a bowl, warmed up and mixed

You can get a brass stamp cut by a Malaysian or Chinese maker for as little as £14 [2 x 2 cm]. It comes with a screw in bar which will fit any ordinary soldering iron or pyrogravure. The ordering to delivery time of a stamp is about 10 days

Different rules in the EU for bee products to be 'organic'. The hive has to be 5 kilometers from any major road thoroughfare. Impossible to do in Northern Ireland Bees will fly up to 3.5 miles to collect nectar to make honey and pollen for food. Pollen is pure protein. Nectar is sugars. Bees process the nectar in a honey stomach to turn it into a thick pure sugar solution. Then some chosen worker bees are fed honey by their sisters and these bees turn the consumed honey into wax. It takes 5 to 7 pounds weight to make one pound of wax Because of recent infections and pests beekeepers feed their bees antibiotics and other chemicals - during the winter, when there is no honey collection going on, so that these medicines do not enter the human food chain. However these chemicals remain in the wax as we are not supposed, or expected, to eat that - but many people do Ask your beekeeper what chemicals/medicines he/she/they use. Normal use is usually low amounts, too much is very bad BTW; I use my own beeswax from when I was a beekeeper. I still have several pounds of it.

Are you buying the bees' wax sort of 'off the shelf'? or direct from a beekeeper? If direct from a beekeeper ask for cappings wax; its purer and cleaner I'd avoid cod liver oil; even the best that I know of still smells fishy - I wouldn't like a leather product smelling of fish

Shurly tallow is just another form of unrefined neetsfoot? Both being the fats from cattle

May I say; In Northern Ireland it doesn't matter where the components come from; its the finished article which matters I suppose it might be because we have to import about 90% of things to produce finished goods

Wouldn't it be easy to convert it to a foot pedal operation by attaching a push-rod to the main handle and a crank at the bottom of the push-rod, attached to a pedal. Like a crankshaft - cam operating over-head/side valves in an engine via a pushrod, only just one set rather than 16?

Yes, but thats what I and my [few] customers want. We find it a. more comfortable b. easier to get into the bag without the strap getting in the way c. holds the bag closer to the body when turned around, for greater security

Count that as your practice piece. Outline your errors in pen or pencil with a ring around them. Study them; see what you think you did wrong and how you can do it better. Slowly, ever so slowly is the way to do the delicate carving/cutting. For thin-ish delicate cuts I actually prefer using a Swann Morton scalpel with a fine blade for cutting Photocopy the design, make it a bit stretched length-wise, might make doing the letters easier.

okee-doakly you need a basic photo editing program or use the likes of Photobucket. I'll say what I do; 1. I use a very basic Photoediting program. [= PaintShop Pro, which was on a free CD on a magazine very many years ago] In it I can re-size the photo. I use a Canon 50D and Fuji 5000. I save the original photo into my files where I want it. Then I bring it into the photo editing window. No matter what size the original is I can 'crop' it - remove excess photo around the sides, then I save that photo to another file where I want the copies. Then I choose to resize it from the 'Image' menu. I can set the pixel x pixel size to any I want. I make the largest side no more than 760 pixies thus the shorter size is usually well under 600. I save this photo with the same name as the two original copies but with the suffix of s - for small, eg 'Img,1234s'. The image/photo suite that came with your camera may well have a similar facility - seach the drop-down menus. I place the small image on Photobucket and from there I can post it anywhere on the internet. It keeps my useage of Photobucket small, Currently I have nearly 1700 photos on it for only 430mb of storage. 2. Another way to do this is to put the original large photo directly onto Photobucket. It has an editing menu in which the photo can be resized to a any size, just type in the numbers. Then re-save in the new size. Note; you can save the smaller image as an extra one or to replace the original. Then copy the image URL to paste into here Othee photo hosting sites have some editing facilities too but I can only say about Photobucket as thats the one I use. #1 sounds long but I've been doing it that way for 10 years and I can do a bunch of photos in short time ~~ in all cases I recommend you save your original photo to your computer and either a DVD/CD or extra hard drive and only use copies to mess with

The only bags I make are variations on the messenger type, from small to medium large. I've just about settled on having the strap mounted via tabs and brass loops on the upper corners of the rear. A bit like the bag in your penultimate photo; but both on the rear, tabs a bit longer, set in from the corners a bit, maybe 1/5 of the bag width. Sometimes I use hooks or snaps so the strap is removable, sometimes not and the strap is permanently attached

very classical looking

I'm going to be your analyst; as you are posting here for ideas, thought and suggestions because you are 'not sure' about it then you are not happy making such a holster. Tell the client that having considered it you'd not be happy making such a holster for anybody and walk away from the deal. Better to walk away than make something you're not content will do the job required for if it does as you expect then its failings will reflect badly on you and your work

From reading other peoples' discussion on this; I believe there is company in the US called 'Harbor Freight' or something which sells a/p at a good price. Also; I believe the 1 ton version has a hole in the press bar which matches the Tandy letter adapters for their press

Firstly; an explanation; I live in Northern Ireland. We have a very high amount of rainfall plus no place is more than 50 miles from a sea. Metal items rust very speedily; you can actually see the corrosion setting in on some things over just a few days. I've had nickle and brass plated steel based rivets showing corrosion inside a week. Last year I dumped 1000 unused, new, bagged, nickle plated steel rivets as all of them were showing signs of corrosion bubbles

The legs on that 'stamping table' look fine for front-room parlor furniture but rather spindly for an actual working stamping table. I use to use a table which was stronger built than that but I got too much table bounce. I built my self a special block table. LumpenDoodle2; put a trailer on that thar time machine - I'll take a couple of the tool chest and wood tool racks. Don't want no stinkin easily broken plasticky stuff

Normal woodworking PVA* is good for this. It makes a good strong bond. Prime seal the wood surface first with a coat of diluted PVA first. After it has dried, apply a second coat to the wood suface and apply the leather, in stages, eg top, then two opposite sides, other two sides etcetera. Let each area dry before moving onto the next. A good alternative is contact adhesive. When I use that I prefer the time-bond version. You can reposition the leather a bit, the glue doesn't fully stick until 12 hours or more later * I was asked to repair a sword grip, on site, one day. The owner had tried various other glues but the leather kept coming loose as he fought. I peeled it off, cleaned the grip up a bit and stuck it back on with PVA. It is still holding 5 years on.

I have had straps pull out from around the rivets when under strain or constant use. I changed to putting the straps on the 'Al Stohlman' way - through a slot in the bag's leather so the strap is riveted on the inside - thu the slot - then riveted on the outside as well. No failures since changing to this way. I prefer brass based double head rivest now. I have found that the steel based rivets will show corrosion over time no matter what their top coating is whereas brass still looks good when it ages. As for strength of either, not done any actual test but they seem to be just as strong

Not necessarily; one can buy the individual letters and do them that way For about $50 one can buy a full alphabet set of letters 1cm [3/8''] high letters in italic script made in brass for use with a pyrogravure/soldering iron

1. yes, most good leather suppliers will have some available but grey is not common and may need to be ordered in - at extra cost. 2. Black dye will still give you black 3. Leave it as it comes, or put a couple of coats of 'Resolene' 4. yes, it will be 'toxic' to the photos. The chemicals used in tanning leather will attack the photo inks or silver based image in a matter of days. The alternative is to use an archival rated storage pouch within the leather pouch

You don't want a fan blowing air across the work space. That stirs up the dust and makes any over-spray lift into the air. What you want is something to suck air from your chosen workspace Get to a DIY store; get a bathroom or kitchen air fan which effectively sucks the air. Attach it to some flexible hosing, sold specially for fitting the fans so it'll match it ok. Build a box out of MDF. [I use an old cardboard box] Put a hole in the top for the tubing, put the other end out thru a doorway as you've no windows. Put that end into a box with shredded paper or similar in it, but not tightly. When spraying just turn on the fan and it'll pull the overspray away from you

Most excellent artwork on those holsters If you are doing a number of items then getting a custom stamp done can work out cheap pro-rata I can get large stamps made for about $3 per square inch, minimum charge is about $120 for 40sq inches. That would do two stamps this size; so $60 per, on 10 items its then $6 per item But that artwork is sommat else

oh man, you have me in stitches

No, I'm somewhere else, with very draconian laws on just about everything