RockyAussie

If you want to make your belt stitching quicker and easier on a CB 4500 Cowboy machine then check out this video I just made. With the Cowboy standard drop down guide I changed it over to a flat bar guide which ALMOST allows hands free sewing. This is done with a size 27 LR needle in it at the moment and I think with a smaller needle the test would have worked out better still. The video -

Not at present friend but it is a good idea let me see what I can come up with.

Just in case you have missed this oiling point you can see in this video I did at about 5 minutes in a point that should been done on these machines fairly often -

Nice looking work the @TVvoodoo. Are you running a web page yet? You can put the link here as well which may help. Welcome to the pro world

Techsew, Cowboy and a few others come to mind. What country are you in? This post may have something of interest -

What is stopping you using the machine for the top line? Are the handle attachments in the way? Move them down a little if that is the problem. You could shorten the handle part where it stitches on as well if needed.

I bet she loves the ones you made more. Any pics to share?

Good news Rick. Them little things can make a big difference

What....that's that black duck mob is it not??? You should be making her some alpha2 better stuff that does not need repairing now.

Thanks for the feedback @BDAZ Thank you as well @sbrownn

A close up picture showing how parallel your feed dog is as against the back presser foot may help. With pressure on and with the foot not quite touching. My first suspicion is needle size to thread and overall top and bottom tension. Will the next size up needle fix it. If you lower your bobbin tension a 1/4 turn and back off your top tension does it improve? Is your presser foot tension way more than need be? I run as little foot pressure as possible to keep the needle from lifting the work as possible. Is your back foot swivelling back and forth? Sometimes the back foot little tabs at the top don't snug up to the presser bar tight enough. I generally take them feet to the anvil and hammer them in But make sure when you close them in that you dont have the foot angling up at the front when you put it in. Hammer the front tab? back a bit first then look for the parallel between the feed dog and foot. I just did a search and found this video at about 4 mins in shows the sloppy back foot I am talking about - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6jfIaf3aww Other than that I am out of ideas....best of luck.

You are selling leather and mostly to people that would know the leather symbol (without the hole) so for me this one is good.

It looks to insipid to me. No strength and it needs to be a lot bolder. For package branding and stamping I would look to how it looks in black and white only and the font needs to be strong and simple to read - Union Leather Supply

This is the post mentioned above that may be what you are looking for. You can see in it that you can get down to around 4 oz total thickness but with your machine the smallest leather point needle is a 160 - 23 and that means the 138 (20m) thread is about it. Cost of the narrow needle plate set with delivery into the USA is $110 US.

That is some pretty fine looking stitching going on there in my opinion. With your crew punch holes, you may find a bit of practice with a pointy tip soldering iron could help. I run one through a light dimmer switch to keep the temperature down. Other thing I just thought, I have made up my own crew punches at times using seamless pipe. I make a steel piece up first the shape of the hole to help hammer the pipe into shape after I have flattened the pipe down a bit. I heat up with a gas blow torch and tap away until the shape is getting close then drive the pre made punch down into the hole and tap away some more. Grind the tip shape and finish off with a polish. I then find a bolt that is a little loose fit on the hammering end and put some tape on to keep it in place while I use the punch. You want it loose enough to take out to empty the cut out pieces.

Does the pattern have another keeper in it for that strap hanging out? @toxo looks pretty darn good to me

Hey @Wizcrafts, You did not stitch that 1" part that close to the edge when you sewed it did you? It was sanded back after stitching somewhat was it not? I hate to think of the consequences of trying to go that close to the edge on anything near that thick, especially for a beginner.

They come with a plastic cap to go over the brush which keeps it good for about 3 days or more generally. The plastic cap splits after awhile so I just wrap some tape around it to keep it more airtight. I generally keep a few spare brushes all the same and keep them soaking in some thinners between uses. The army type cans come in handy for that - Also a bottle with a bolt attached into its lid works well for the spike swapping

Yeah it does a bit. When I see that I need something better and I work out a solution I figga a few other could use the same thing also so I just share it around. That's alright mate. Friend of mine awhile back ran his Harley into the side of a bus. His missus said "How did you do that?" he replied he didn't see it. Quick as a wit she holds one hand in front of her eyes and moves her other arm around and said "BUS... WHAT BUS" Twas a bit hard not to laugh at him lying down in that hospital bed all wrapped up an all.

Clear contact cement. Try searching Duall contact adhesive. Depends which part of the world you are maybe. What you don't see much here is the strands that get around when you load up the swiper. A Kabi glue gun can make it easier.

Mostly this tells me you need a medium small cylinder arm machine. This video I made recently should be considered I think. A look at my Wild Harry web site shows a wide range of products we make and most of them can be made with the machine in this video. The machine is a clone of a Juki dsc 246. There are quite a few other brand copies of this machine including the Techsew 2600. Here is the video link - Note that the open end table is important in my opinion.

Gotta get your eyes checked mate. Even his fold up table has extended legs and that beautiful machine already has a good adjustable light. Only thing missing as yet I can see is a drop down guide in place. Double ditto on that. @bladegrinder on the back of the head you may see 2 screw holes already waiting for a drop guide as this pic below shows. I just finished modding a heap of these guides up for them so they can be a straight bolt on.

Another idea to consider is using a diode laser. You can easily change the size in the software to whatever you want by percentage. For cut out patterns on card I use mine to cut out the pattern straight with the laser. No more hand cutting for me to go wobbly on. If I want a faint line to do a stitch line or carve line pattern you just set the power as light as you want. With the program I use I can get it to do cutting lines and light mark lines all at the same time by using different colours in the drawing. Where this gets used a lot is when I cut out our product boxes where the cutting lines are black (full power) and the fold lines are green which are about 20% of full power. The colour lines are able to be adjusted to whatever percent of full power you want. Other advantages are I use it to cut fabric at times, cut thin leather or emboss patterns, cut out acrylic stamps for embossing leather and a few other things as well. The A3 Elksmaker pro I started with cost around $300 but I rebuilt it to where It can now do poster size pieces and has fume extraction and improved cooling so that I can run it for hours at a time. Those extras cost about another $500 plus my time to do it.

@Ben00 you said above to quote "You also said you hand skive the outside edges of the norbuck and croc skin specifically to avoid valleys between the leather". This had me lost and searching for where you may have gotten this idea. I believe it may be a misunderstanding from what I wrote in the watch band tutorial as below. "This one below shows the skiving done on the straps with the Fortuna and a little hand skiving to achieve no thickness on the ends. This is done to minimise getting any holes in the valleys." What I was meaning to convey there was that the skiving machine can not skive the crocodile down to zero at the edge without getting some chopping out where the valleys are between the scales. The only part done by hand with the skiving was the ends with a boot makers knife. Generally I don't go any thinner than around 1.2mm combined as mentioned in the watchband tutorial example. The thinner your edges are the quicker and easier the edging is to do. The dress belts I do will often be around 2mm at the edge and the hornback croc ones are around 4mm at the edge. The dress belt ones you can see some of the making of in this following video and note that the high profile on them is achieved by putting a filler strip between the layers - It appears that you are getting some burn marks on the painted areas and that is not a normal thing. Is the paint you are using behaving like the paint being ironed in this video? The paint should flow around like putty when it goes correctly and allow the reshaping and filling of holes fairly easily. In this video the heat is too high in my opinion. Sometimes if you go higher up above the tip can help as well if the tip is over hot. The soldering irons I use are 60 watt and I get ones with the bigger tips to enable me to shape them as I do. I mentioned that I use a light dimmer switch to control the temperature, I do this by putting the dimmer switch and a power plug with light into a box as shown below. The hotter the iron, the brighter the light shows which helps a little. I mark an ideal position onto control part when I have found a good average position. The burn marks you have should be able to be sanded off and scothbrited. It will take some time to get competent with it.

No tall post machine used in there somewhere. I just started using one recently and have found it to be an excellent addition for totes and stuff. Can cut out a fair bit of time with the right designs. I should be doing some videos on it sometime soon.