RockyAussie

Yes I have in the past milled leather in a drum which is like a large tumble dryer or front loading washing machine. The time it takes varies on the skin or skins being milled. Often pieces of carpet and even old sandshoes get thrown in to help it happen faster. The falling action helps it to soften. There are a lot faster machines for normal leather which use a series of pegs on one drum with a series of holes in alignment on the other drum. These turn and pull the leather through and can be a very aggressive method. Either method if overdone will wreck the fibres eventually and the softening process should ideally employ some oils if possible along with or instead of. If the skin you have is glazed then I would not look at milling it as it would craze crack everywhere. Not knowing the skin and how it is tanned I can only suggest applying several coats of Nivea cream(the one without any alcohol in it) and letting it soak in between applications. If it is a glazed skin a bit of quick rough sanding on the rough/flesh side can break the tension and make it a lot better to work with. This must be done so as to not let the sanding get hot in any one position or the skin can end up burned and harder. I think I may have shown a bit of this earlier in this post on some glazed skin cut for bangles. A dremel wont be of any help on this.

The answer really depends on whether you want it for hobby use or regular work use. Many of the cheaper products use bushes instead of bearings and I found out the hard way that going with the quality products is often in the end cheaper. A bigger factor also is the dust extraction as that fine leather dust aside from going everywhere also can build up in your lungs. If your thinking of long term production let me know and I'll load some pictures of a few different machines I use that do this type of work.

Small world isn't it. I still miss him a lot, as you say... he was a real good bloke. Loaned me $10,000 when I got into ostrich products manufacturing many years back but of course I then had to give his work priority at least until I paid him back. You never seen someone so unhappy to get his money back.. It didn't really change though as I still did my best when I could for him. You know ...he never told me he won all those years in a row or that he ever won anything at all. I only found that out at at his funeral where of all things they had a big screen showing all of his knives and awards. I had to leave a bit early

That was done to start with 2 pieces of wood routed out to receive the blade nicely then attached together. After that I sanded down until I liked the shape in relation to the knife and the thickness of croc that covers it. The tip and the other end were left short in the covering and from there Morrie made his silver pieces and trimmed the excess croc to the shape. The silver parts are then araldited and pinned onto the wooden section just covering slightly a little of the croc skin. Best as I can remember on that one. Some of them were really quite detailed in the making.

Yes the top ones are Australian saltwater crocodile, the top one is from a large elbow section and the bottom one is near to the tail tip. As for the sheaths in the last picture ....I made them along with a jeweller friend whose hobby was making the knives. I only made the exotic leather working parts and he made the silver attached parts. He won awards with his knives for so many years they actually have an award named after him today. Maurice (Morrie) McCarthy Here is a link that shows better some of his work - https://www.australianbladeforums.com/vb4/knife-show-pictures/787-melbourne-2011-maurice-mccarthy.html Thanks mate... I am going to have to find another knife maker so I can try out a few more of these I reckon.

Thank you. These are what motivated me to get a 441 style cylinder machine. All the above was done at the time on a little 335 phaff cylinder machine.

Hi Tor, long time no see. I myself have only tried working with the ABS a couple of times and did not get great results. I did try the acetone on it and it seemed to work some. Mostly I use this pla+ which claims to be stronger than the abs and a few other alternatives. So far I can't fault it.

I don't work with caiman skins so I cant say what size they use normally. The size of the salwater crocodile (porosus) skins we use varies a lot but an average would be around the 40cm. The sanding is from the back when sanding the bones. A couple of pictures of some bags I made show this better perhaps - This one shows that sometimes the skins can be very thick and as I said some good sanding machinery is needed. Note that the bones are very carefully sanded out at the edges as much as possible. These are all, as I said before attached to a fabric to stabilise the skin behaviour Here you see that the inner curve section has to have a zipper sewn to it and the outer edge has to be able to curve over and be sewn into the back of the bag

Small or large it is possible but some good sanding equipment is required. To some degree you need to sand the bones out behind where you want to stitch. They are a fair bit of extra work and time to make. Also we normally don't do folded edges on these ones as in the first pic below. This is the same model without the folded edges This is a coin purse model This one may show the edging process a little better These crown style ones below are very popular but there is only one possible per crocodile of course.

You could be right there depending on the overall size but I have found that if you tripoli polish the knives occasionally you can get away with the 19mm(3/4") for quite a few years. 10 to 12oz is only about 4to 5mm and I have knives that do that no problem. I don't generally do any saddlery type work but if its croc in Australia it often ends up in front of me. This first picture shows some prototypes I designed for a customer that wanted them for some campdraft prizes. They are a brow band, a couple of different spur straps and a single slobber strap all in imitation croc at this stage.Most of these are in the 12 to14oz range. When it came to the real croc stage the customer wanted a more simplified look as shown here

That was an interesting read. Funny how he gets fined 5 billion and he still goes up 30 billion in the same year. I guess the US gov cant really collect that sort of info directly for themselves on their own people and it would seem that he can help them out there. Many other countries would say that he was not a fit person to run such a business and break it up instead of fining him. Taking a leaf out of his book one would just copy the model and add a proper privacy storage system. As usual greed and apathy will prevail.

Your retainer now looks a lot better. I don't usually do a welt on the top of the blade unless it is sharp as well. I make the welt about 10mm or 3/8" if you like and that normally gets sanded back some at the finishing stage. You can make the retainer part of the back if you want to give it a go as shown in the pictures below. Note: that I generally wet mould the front piece and let it dry overnight. If I am attaching an exotic that is done dry with glue at this stage and trimmed up and then attached to be stitched. I Do NOT attach the male part of the clip until the pouch is nearly finished as that allows a good tight fit then. I punch the hole for it with a piece of wood covered in leather and set the snap by using a piece of metal or an anvil tip poked inside the top hole. If the knife is a show piece I then generally make a thin disk of leather and glue it inside to cover the back of the snap. In answer to your question about how much blade space -1/8" loose fit inside should be fine but a little more could be safer until you get more experience.

I was just thinking that this post should be in the "help wanted" section. The "services" section is more for people offering services I think. You could repost it there as well or ask a mod to move it there. The smaller size press opens the door for a lot more people. From the material you mentioned and having checked your profile I am guessing that this is saddlery/horse related and that the quality required is to be a high standard. Press knife cutting does a nice job of rounding in the edges on this material compared to a laser and would be looking in that area. 95% of the work we do is not what you see on my website as it is mostly for other brand names big and small. I would consider contacting companies whose work you think is good and see what they can offer. Get a confidentiality agreement signed first if you are really worried. Google has plenty of versions. Best of luck. Brian

I think there is often an aesthetic reason but I do it often to reduce the stretch in the straps at least for some time. I have never done a scientific type off pull test to verify that but, just pulling by hand 2 straps cut from the same hide there is a noticeable reduction in the stretch of the stitched one. This may depend on the closeness of the stitch spacing and the thread type and how well it is done. If the tensions were loose both sides it probably would not help.

Well done mate. I know you had fun doing those gusset base corners.

Whoever said that never saw a kangaroos or crocodiles brain size. A 3.5m crocodile has a brain the same size as a walnut .

Hey Don, I am most likely out due to freight costs etc but a clicker press for that many pieces is almost certainly the better way to go. Not having any idea of the complexity of the shape and the size it is hard to be sure but would it fit into 17"x 17" or 13"x17"? Most clicking presses that people have will be limited to around these sizes but there are a lot larger ones than that,that fewer people will have. Lasers also will have size limitations. A simple die or knife can often be made for less than $200 and that works out well over 500 pieces and generally the cutting time is less than a minute each. If you would like some more feedback a picture of the product would help but, you could pm me if you don't want to show it as yet.

You can get spring style snaps that dont have any dome side on the female outer side. WE call them invisible snaps which are for this purpose. In Australia here I can get them from Marish accessories. His catalogue does not show the post part I am talking about but it is available. I would be very surprised if they were not available from Ohio Travel accessories. You will need the dies to install as well as they have a retractable post part that goes inside to hold for lining up the parts.

Does that specifically include pollies??? Eggs seem to be coming under the firing line.

That is a good point. Where there is an opening to express opposing ideas it all to often exposes the worst extremes of humanity. In my search trying to see any answers from a vegans perspective I did find it interesting that a lot of the comments below this post from Ethical Vegan confirmed a lot of my thinking on the matter. I must add that at least they have been ethical enough to allow the comments to be seen and for that at least they should be commended. http://ethicalvegan.net/read/will-animals-go-extinct-if-the-world-becomes-vegan

WOW!!!!!! ...its been awhile since I followed anyone. You just got another one. Took me 10 minutes to remember you got to go to the persons profile to follow them

Are you thinking that the Yamata FY 810. will allow you to stitch around on a made up sneaker? This type of post machine will allow good manoeuvring on an upper when it is out flat but will not be any use for getting around the toe area. The video you mention is using a different machine where you see it going around inside the shoe. The type shown there is way more expensive. You can get some shoe patching machines to do it that are quite cheap but the quality of stitch can be very erratic and takes a long to get any good at. Other than that goggle Robin Industries and have a look at their selection. They have both types. http://www.robinindustry.com/

Looks pretty good to me. As Danne said you do NOT want any burnishing agents or even any burnishing at all to get the best adhesion. Some years back in always trying to improve I got the edges so smooth I was later able to peel the edging off in a long strip. Rough nap and iron is best.

From what I can understand this position on this policy is very recent and I have found a huge amount of posts bringing this issue up now. Our website is done with Shopify and they informed us that it was possible to now use facebook/instagram to market sell our products in a connected way via hitting the shop icon to the left in facebook. Although we have tried several times we continue to get rejected product notices from Facebook as shown in my posting above as do many others now. Personally I don't use facebook and don't much care one way or the other whether we get to use the platform or not. WHAT I AM CONCERNED ABOUT IS THE NUMBER OF BUSINESSES NOW THAT DISGUISE THEIR WORDING TO GET PAST THE FACEBOOK ROBOTS AND STAFF. I SEE THAT THE EXTREMIST GROUPS WILL BE ABLE ABLE TO USE EVERY FORM OF MEDIA TO SLANDER THESE BUSINESS AND GET EVEN MORE MEDIA TRACTION TO APPLY EVEN MORE PRESSURE. As I said facebook marketing if it is not there to me is no big deal but I DO love animals a lot. I don't see how what the Vegans and some animal rights groups are proposing is not far more cruel. I have gone through their web pages for days and can find NO answer to what will happen to all of these animals. Particularly farmed animals. I would easily agree that many farming practices could be improved for the animals and that they should be focused on. To desex them gives no right to their offspring to have any life at all and for them to be mothers. Sheep and many farm animals have little to no defence from preditators so letting them loose would be vastly more cruel a death than is practised in real life at present. If they were to be somehow kept safely as they are at present and there is no economic reason to keep them, who pays and how can they be kept? Then perhaps and most likely huge numbers will have to be slaughtered. Are the proponents willing to do it or hide away and just pay for it? That may be possible because a common theme on all of their websites is DONATE DONATE DONATE. They also promote that pets should not be allowed to be kept . A trip to Bali where something similar to this type of thinking would show how cruel it is. The dogs are mostly not owned and they are thin and bony and starving and full of mange. I have cows and dogs and trust me the love goes both ways and THEY DO NOT AS THEY SUGGEST and to quote just one- " The life of the average farmed animal is filled with pain, suffering, loss, sickness, crowding, surgical mutilations without pain relief, filth, lameness, loneliness and premature death". The average statements shows me that most of these people have NEVER had any thing to do with raising animals. Because I love animals I would ask if it is possible that the forum here would consider perhaps as one of the largest group of leather workers in the world that FACEBOOK would make their position clearer as to whether leather products are acceptable or not on their platform??? I do not want any extremist groups able to get further traction that is possible at the moment. If they are in or out is all we need to have clarity on.

There are a few on here that do a little posting occasionally but you may like to have a look at a forum started by Peter Nitz. It mostly deals with the high end work and much of it seems well put. . I have noticed a couple of members here including a couple of my followers on here have joined it. I have not joined myself only because I did not find any thing new for me to learn there as yet. I may do at a later stage perhaps. I look for a broader spectrum of interest which I find here better for myself. Here is a link - https://leathercraftcommunity.com/