Bree

I love the black version!! LOL!! Just kidding. Beautiful, professional work. Now show us the vinegaroon version!!!

#69 bonded nylon would be my pick. A medium weight industrial machine will easily sew the leather and the focus will be on the pillow and not the stitches. The nylon thread has good stretch and flex and is quite strong... over 11 lbs tensile strength which should be more than enough for the intended application.

Don't forget some good quality wet-dry paper to take full advantage of that flat surface plate.

I am a webmaster for a certain Big Blue company. I build enterprise websites and develop web applications using Cold Fusion and Oracle among other things. Currently I am primary production support for 6 different applications and a couple dozen websites on the AT&T account... our largest customer. I also have a little business sewing patches and doing leather repair mostly for bikers. I have been equipping my shop for the day that IBM send me a pink slip and a request to train my replacements from Mumbai. I dodged that bullet recently and bought a few more months but the day of reckoning is coming. Then I will join all the leatherworkers reveling in the poor house!! Hopefully I can get a production operation running quickly and efficiently and make enough to pay the bills... and have a little fun doing it.

+1

I agree with Banwell. Those who don't like EBay are free to market their products elsewhere if they think they can do it with less expense. Ebay is a business and they can and will charge whatever the market will bear. It's called free enterprise. I like it that way. Because just as my customers no NO ENTITLEMENT to cheap prices on my work, EBay sellers and buyers have no entitlement to cheap fees. Ebay will charge as much as it possibly can and still keep people coming back for more. When they stop coming back, fees will drop... I can just about guarantee it. That's the nature of the beast.

I accept the challenge!! Send the horns!!

Some ServiCar PIX for your amusement.

I have one of these that I got from the guy who comes to the leather shows. It was inexpensive and works great. Very comfortable and there are several magnifiers to choose from. http://www.qedisit.com/techlights.htm

Great seat... great bike. Love those Servicars. My favorite old bike. I remember when I was a child in Chicago. The Chicago Police Motor Officers drove white Servicars and FH's. I absolutely loved those machines... especially the Servicars. The dealer here in Buffalo has one and it's waycool.

That is an awesome carving. How about using a pear shader to reproduce the shadows and highlights of the waves in the picture and then using some decorative cuts to bring out the motion of the waves? Maybe background mat the darkest parts of the water? My $.02

Yep. I knew when I saw it that that guy's website would tease up the curious mind. Give a guy a high powered microscope and there's just no telling what kind of damage he can do!!! He is probably a great example of what you really ought to do. Now do we really do what we ought to do??? I don't THINK so!! I am inveterate orbiter. I like to just slowly orbit my stones around the blade until I can feel that wire edge and then a little stropping to clean it up and the blade gets sent to work. Microbevels 2, 3, 4, etc are just more than I can or want to handle. So do as I say not as I do!! LOL!

Here is some different info for you to consider. Kind of interesting. This sharpening guy has an extensive website with microscopic photos showing you exactly what's going on with a sharp blade. He uses the flat plate (glass) and abrasives method. Pay particular attention to the "wire edge" and its removal. You have to click in on this site as there isn't a coherent navigation system. Make sure to find the Sharpening A-Z link and follow it. http://www3.telus.net/BrentBeach/Sharpen/index.html

Jerry Zonis from Artisan called me today. He was monitoring our chat and then checked out the LA-25 model. He discovered that the casting for the arm is slightly different than the t-4000 16" arm or the T-3000 castings. The problem that I am having affects only the LA-25's. He said that there is plenty of cast iron to do a little Dremel grinding and make some extra room for the wheel to move forward an extra 1/8th". He is sending me some matching paint so I can paint over the cut and make it look healthy again. So I am going to grind it out. You just have to love those Artisan guys. They are like angels watching over us. Thanks Jerry!

I think it's better because it sets up very fast. You can be working and sewing very quickly with Fabri-Tac. It's kind of like airplane glue... the kind that you make models with. At least it reminds me of that stuff. Not sure what the heck is in it but it works quickly and holds strong enough to keep seams tight for sewing. I have a quart of Tandy Leather Weld but I like Fabri-Tac a lot better. It isn't strong enough to be a structural adhesive but it is just right for prepping material for sewing operations. Downside... Fabri-Tac is a lot more expensive. My $.02.

Pretty darn cool Josh.

LOL!! Yes that would make it harder. I wonder if I couldn't take some mounting tape with a foam core and wrap it around the roller once and then run some duct tape around it to cover the seam and provide some traction. That would give me a lot of expansion with out wrapping a zillion turns of tape. Makes it easier to remove as well.

Great start! Getting the table and hardware to fit your bod is really important. You need to be able to operate all the controls with ease so that you can concentrate on the sewing. That is the fun part... sewing stuff and making things... not futzing around with the machine controls all the time. Just for fun, here is an exercise for you... take two pieces of fabric, stack them, and then cut them so that they have a long straight section and then several curves... wide ones, tight ones etc. Position your needle so that it is 1/8" from the edge of the fabric. Now sew all the way down the straight section and along the curves. The object is to maintain exactly 1/8" from the border and to always have the top and bottom pieces exactly aligned together. It's trickier to do then one might think. The faster you try to sew the harder it gets. There is little room for error on this one so sew carefully. Good luck!

Like Randy said Fabri Tac is great stuff. I use it a lot for helding seams together and to lock thread ends. I used to use it to hold patches on but now I use carpet tape as it is faster and less messy.

If you mess up your $135 blade, I gonna delete my posts!!

I am using Tuff Kote. It's great stuff so long as you have a solvent base coat. It's a pain in the butt if you are using a water-soluable base coat because it ends up dissolving some of the base coat and running if you put too much on. I was using some Fiebing Edge Coat which is water-base with the Tuff Kote so I had to be very careful today. Next time I fool with this combination I'm going to airbrush the Tuff Kote on ever so lightly in several layers to avoid these problems. Today I was using a block of felt on the edges.

Ed... I think it is the same roller guide. Mine looks to be about 84 mm long and the wheel is 28 mm from outermost knurling to outermost knurling. I was hoping to avoid calling Artisan. Skip has an idea that might work. Increase the diameter of the roller itself with tape. I never thought of that. And the tape might be stickier against the leather than the chrome roller giving a better "roll". I may investigate that further. I had to run my roller against my burnisher motor for some time to get a little inner burr worn off to get free rotation. The tape idea would have been very useful when I was fooling around trying to remove that burr. Any other ideas?

Great idea! That is the concept for sure. Get those pieces bonded together with no pockets of air or non contact. You could probably do the same thing with a Tipmann embosser and a special roll with a rim but no embossing or creasing... just a rimmed flat roller. That would give you the best of your way and the channeling jig that I like to use to make sure the blanks register together. Cool. I love this site.

What exactly is the problem?? I just got done glueing up a double blank belt using some Tandy Tanner's Bond contact cement. I prefer Barge but I wanted to use up this Tandy cement before I opened a gallon of Barge. Did you rough up the leather a little to give the cement something to bite on? If you are glueing flesh to flesh, you might want to consider an extra coat of cement as the leather tends to suck it up and you might need a little more glue surface for a strong bond. Did you pound it out or rub the pieces together with some force to make sure that all the surfaces bond together tightly? I use a jig on my drill press to hold the bottom blank and then I have a registration pin that allows me to precisely line up the top blank for the initial glue to glue contact. The jig is exactly the width of the blanks so they mate precisely as I roll from the left the top blank over the bottom blank which extends out to the right. Once I have them mated precisely, out come the now bonded blanks and I put a piece of lint free cloth over the top and use a flatting hammer or tamper to rub the blanks together without damaging them or showing any signs of the tamper's action. I go back and rub the edges hard to make sure they bond tight as that is the most likely point of separation. The lint free cloth is the only thing in contact with the leather and it remains stationary as the tamper moves over it and applies the pressure that assures a good bond. This process works well for me. Those blanks are locked together very tightly and keep the belt together until I can get to the sewing step to finish the bonding process. Whether it's Barge, Tanner's Bond, Weldwood, 3M laminate cement, Duall, Pliobond, or any of the other contact cements, if you don't prepare them right and bond them tightly, there is a chance that they won't stick together very well. Preparation is very important with these contact cements in my opinion... more important than which one you use... cuz they all work.

Oh most venerated leather sewing minds and Artisan aficionados... I ran into a problem today and I'm not sure about the best way to solve it. I was making up a double layer gunbelt for a friend in Georgia. I wanted to sew it in a groove, the center of which is 1/8" from the edge of the belt. I wanted to use my Artisan roller guide to maintain exact distance but couldn't. It seems that the guide can only reach somewhere in the neighborhood of 3/16-1/4" from the tip of the needle. It is just a wee bit away from the place I want to groove the belt. The rub is that the guide center channel of the roller guide base has sufficient room to reach into 1/8" from the needle center. What is stopping it is the knurled wheel under the base that locks the guide onto its base plate. That wheel contacts the curve of the T-4000 outer arm assembly which stops the guide from moving its full travel towards the needle bar. I am a little reluctant to get out a grinder and grind off the cast iron of the sewing machine's arm to make room for that knurled wheel to move that extra 1/16"-3/32" that I need. I thought about trying to get the wheel on top of the base plate but that just doesn't work. The design of the roller guide doesn't permit moving the wheel top the top. Trimming 1/8" off the wheel diameter might work except then you can't reach it to lock down the guide. ARGGHHHH!!! Luckily I have a 3 1/2" magnetic seam guide that I can use to form a guide wall. It is not a great solution because the magnets are not very strong and it can move out of position if I apply too much force. I guess I could make a wooden guide with some very powerful neodymium magnets but I would rather find a way to use my roller guide. Any suggestions???