Seamus

Thanks. I'll have to have the wife watch freecycle for an old vacuum that has a good motor. Thanks to everyone for the input!

I think the nearest Tandy to me is in Richmond, VA. Maybe a 2 hour drive. Might be a good weekend thing to pull off when I don't have a Ren. Faire to get to. I'll also be living about 4 hours from Zack White Leather, so maybe I can get there at some point to take a class they might offer. Yes. I learned quickly that it needs to be wet to get anything done. lol

Ok, I've been stitching/shaping leather for a little over a year now. I've made several pouches and sporrans as well as a couple mugs and some bttoles. The mugs and bottles have brought me to a juncture where I need to start tooling the leather. So far, I've done large, less detailed designs and have used and ink pen to get the depression I was looking for. Once I've gotten the depression, I go back and use paint or a fine point sharpy to give the depressions some color. Now, I'm trying smaller, more intricate designs, and the use of the pen is killing my hand. Is there some sort of tool I need to get myself to make this process easier?

It looks like your motor is a starter off of a car. Is it? I mean... I could hit up a junk yard for one of those. I could use an old car battery as the power supply, with a heavy duty switch to turn it on and off. My battery charger would work fine to keep the battery topped off when it gets low on juice. Seems like an easy build to me.

Looks like I'll just take a stab at it. I'll do small batches just big enough to seal up one mug. Once I have it down, I can make bigger batches and use it on my mugs and bottles. My hat's off to you. To steal a quote from the Guinness (yum!) commercials: "BRILLIANT!"

Does this seal it up so it doesn't "unburnish" itself, which is essentially what's happening?

It's true. I've read elsewhere on these forums that burnishing can be done with some spit and a dowel rod. So I tried it on a couple items. Looked really nice... until about 24 hours later when it looked like I had done nothing at all. Am I doing something wrong? Have I missed a step? Is there some sort of prep work involved besides rubbing copius amounts of saliva on the edge and rubbing it to that "burned" stage with the dowel? I'm at wits end with this one!

Speaking of brewers' pitch... I've read a few places about blending it with bees' wax. Apparently, the brewers' pitch by itself is "sticky," but flexible. The bees' wax, by itself, is brittle. If you blend the two, you get a not too brittle, not too sticky sealer. Any ideas as to the ratio?

Glad I could spread the word. I can't take credit for the idea, though. How do you get the deep mahogany finish like the bottle to the right of that photo? Do you dye the bottle or is there coloring in with the wax?

And, now a look at the bottle I need to wax: Shaped it using popcorn kernals. I owe thanks to someone off of these forums for that idea. I was going to use BBs, but the popcorn was much cheaper, and more readily available.

Yes, this was my first attempt at a mug. Not my first leatherworking endeavor, but my first mug. I'm still learning how to tool leather and what not, which is why I went with the simple triquerta design. I have made a second mug, which I will get shots of tomorrow evening. It's considerably smaller (it actually fits completely inside of the first, with room to spare on the sides and above it), but I did a little more extensive tooling. I scored a lattice work into the sides all the way around. Looks very nice, if I do say so myself. I'll post here and let you folks be the judge. Thanks for the complement, and I look forward to seeing your tutorial as I'd like to see if I can improve on my own self taught method.

I just realized that I said 1/2 gallon is 1 quart, yadda yadda. It's actually double all those. I must have been pretty tired.

Well... umm... I'll geek something out and calculate the approximate volume. I can't test it imperically at the moment as the stitching holes would leak. It measures 4.375" in diameter (2.1875" radius). It's 6.875" deep. Doing the math using 3.142 for pi gives us 3.142 x 2.1875 x 2.1875 x 6.875 = 103.365 cubic inches. OnlineConversion.com tells me that this converts to .447 gallons... so... yeah... 1/2 gallon. That'd be 1 quart. 2 pints. 4 cups. 32 ounces. Ultimately... plenty of mead. For our metric friends... thats about 1.6L.

One more shot to demonstrate the size: