Rahere

Just a detail on the punches. Because both sides are visible, a double set of left and right orientated punches is needed to ensure the slope they cut runs the same way front and back. If you imagine the same slope, and open the seam flat, you'll see what I mean, matching holes chevron on the flat. /|\ /|\ /|\

Seamstresses have been using bias binding for many years before sewing machines came along. They line the raw edge up with the centre of the tape, sew one side of the tape, turn it over and sew the other. Sometimes pressing so starch holds it together.

Alibaba had forty colleagues. I guess the rest of the tale speaks for itself.

For those of you in haulage and engineering, that fire today wiped out a major production plant, possibly for the rest of the year. You might want to get stocks in as a result.

As far as the Guild's concerned, a lot of it's to do with one's purpose in life. More particularly, there's two Worshipful Company of Cordwainers and Leatherworkers https://www.arts.ac.uk/colleges/london-college-of-fashion/about-lcf/cordwainers - I just get this image of seried ranks of cobblers prostrate before their lasts. In fact, they've a somewhat Masonic approach to charity, extending their knowledge as seen in that link. It's not a million miles from what you're doing here. At the same time, lobbying's not their monopoly, I've four representations to Parliamentary Select Committees in the fire myself right now. As WS Gilbert put it, "a lot of dull MPs, in close proximity, all thinking for themselves is wot no man can face with equanimity." Sometimes, you need to get your ideas where they matter.

My best tale on over-engineering was the 1970s, hip implants. Led by surgeons, the project was at the point of failure, but fortunately my pa was on the panel as a materials specialist, waited until they 'fessed up, and threw Leonardo at them. The body's a marvellous machine - so let's machine it. Surgeons open and close, watch and learn. He got the prostheticians in, gave them an electrical motorcycle cylinder reamer, jigged it up, instant success. The implant was about half the weight, and the rest is history now.

We'll need to know a lot more before we can advise or explain, I'm afraid. What skin is it, how's it been tanned, what are you intending to use it for, for example. A plasticised chrome tand and a veg tan used for tooling are very different things, and the finishes needed differ correspondingly.

I've sailed as close to the wind as an unqualified accountant as it's possible to do, working as HQ Accountant and Head of Finance in a peer body to NATO and the OECD, because the accounting standards resoect but are not constrained by the IAS. I've also been a volunteer accountant for a major UK charity, and as an economist, I started as a Corporate Money Markets and Foreign Exchange Treasury Dealer, before using my economics training at the hands of two future Governors of the Bank of England to dig several Nations on their beam ends out. I still fart at dawn.

I'm talking doctor of medicine. I'm functionally a doctor of history, without the gown, because I chose to work in the real world, turning Peacemaking into a functional reality. I know that, because I'm a founding member of the Warburg Institute's Esoteric Studies Reading Group, which is strictly post-doctoral, working in the origins of the Renaissance. I'm also coming out of a year studying applied trauma, and am widely quoted in both in Academia. The New Yorker described the Warburg as The Library of the Weird a few years back, and as the core of the University of London's Advanced Studies School, we dare to look at the world as they did then. It can be very practical, looking at how they shook out after the Black Death, linking directly to the issues of global trauma we face now: my input is via Bruce Perry.

Returning to the subject, I've just had to replace a curtain rail, plastic fatigue after 30 years. The same design shows a difference in the runners, the old ones have metal axles, the new ones, plastic, and don't run as smoothly. That's mass production for you, slow degradation of standards. Us, either it's right or it never sees the light of day. There's the difference: their product was never perfect and is declining to the point where "good enough" has to be prefixed by "barely", with the though that in a couple of years, even that won't be true.

The Guilds are more visible as the Livery Companies of the City of London, with input into its very autonomous governance. That aligns with wealth, quite often, in much the same way as the Boston Brahmins behave in the US, albeit with slightly less scandal. Sometimes it's family: I once gave my former boss a reference when he'd built a sufficient stache to make tax exile in Jersey attractive. Why me? My family are Channel Maritime, and that includes Jersey's oldest hotel. That's the connection with a certain Flotilla Captain. Grandpa, Officers' Mess CPO. It's not what you know, nor who you know, but what you know about who you know. I'm often seen as having a superiority complex - and why not, I was the visionary on the team which won the 2012 Peace Prize, but that mostly counts because a certain bespectacled Indian gets his claim through me: I was privileged to tie up the loose end he left when he was assassinated. It worked precisely because his values of humility are cardinal. Yes, when I was a nipper, my neighbours, babysitting, were both the Duke of Norfolk's old nanny on one side and a gypsy rawnee on the other, so I've known high and low, and there's more spark in the low than in the high. It's because we're hands-on, craftsmen.

The Royal Society led to the Professions, though: part of my father's responsibility was membership and discipline of the Mechanical Engineers, and an accident of history made him good friends with Prince Phillip in coordinating that entire sector. It paid off in trumps a year ago getting ventilator production off the ground in just 5 days, his successor in the IMechE leading the entire project. It's illegal to set yourself up as a doctor or accountant, though, if you've not done the exams and gained the experience.

It's actually at the root of modern issues with Freemasonry, that we lurched from feudal to industrial serfdom with very little change at the bottom - or at the top, for that matter. It misrepresents them now, although they do have some élitist tendencies. To put the Commies back in their box, there's nothing wrong with that, if it's based on delivery: sadly the social élite don't deliver, mostly. Right, boxes closed, let's get on.

We tend to forget that as hide, leather protects its owner against almost anything coming its way. When its internal support mechanisma are no more, we substitute tanning and oiling and waxing, and the result can last for thousands of years. We have Egyptian and Celtic chARIOT HARNESSES TO BEAR WITHNESS. a CERTAIN AMOUNT OF ABUSE IS SURVIVABLE.

That's how I read it - my old man wrote the standard for Pressure Vessels, the stock in trade of nuclear power plants for the foreseeable future (or until they get fusion working, and possibly even then).

You're more likely to suffer mildew or wet rot!

Oh, here we go.Patents were originally enterprise initiatives in the face of the craft guilds which had appeared after the Black Death freed skilled workers from feudal serfdom in Free Towns across Europe. They took likely pupils on as apprentices to learn the basics, before sending them out as journeymen, travelling as a kind of pilgrim between hostels, sharing ideas as they went, before returning home ready to demonstrate their competence with a masterpiece. There's a Musée de Compagnage in the French city of Tours dedicated to this: it's where the idea of the original Tour de France came from, long before cycling hijacked it. The craft guilds became excessively powerful, stopping newcomers from getting established, and so letters patent gave some years of Royal protection.

I learned my woodworking in the days before PVA: the classroom kept a pot of pearl glue on the go full-time. Rawhide and ground bone are rendered down until a resin forms, in the shape of droplets, usually with a minimal amount of water, and used as both glue and varnish.

That card holder calls out for vacuum moulding. It sucks most of the surplus water out. Wooden boards are still quite common.

Don't forget @Fredk lives in the Emerald Isle, and it's green because they have plenty of water in the air. In Arizona, that might be an entirely different matter.

This is really a question of a progression of thinking. Yes in the complete standardisation of type, greatly inspired by the Dutch frigate "yacht/hunter" design, no in that it wasn't a sudden inspiration, but something which had been going on for a century. One might even argue that the standard forms of infantry weapons takes the thinking back a hundred years or more before that. You're talking about Samuel Pepys' work, but he followed on the heels of Phineas Pett (1570-1649), who built the Navy which fought the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the 17th Century at Deptford (which Henry VIII founded in 1513) and Chatham (c1550), clearing a small forest east of Woolwich. I was raised in what remains of it, Petts Wood. It's an accident of history that Cornelis van Tromp's House of Orange then followed the Stuarts! Most of the Napoleonic Navy was built either at Chatham or at Bucklers Hard, on the edge of the New Forest, in a shipyard started in around 1700, but to say we had no navy before then is bemusing. My family got mixed up in that from about 1760, we've generations of naval engineers: my schoolmates were astonished to find my immediate integration in the RN while on attachment, with the family nickname instantly applied. Many officers knew my grandpa, Officers Mess CPO Steward, and almost all my uncle, who did most of the torpedo fitting and tuning in Pompey between 1930 and 1970. Elizabeth was constrained in her official expenditure, so encouraged privateer action to force the Spanish to pay for it, in letters patent (the birth of the Patent system of intellectual copyright). The Ordnance Board supplied most if not all of the weapons, which were a State monopoly by then: the Tudors rise was not to inspire rivals! That's how she could legally move against Raleigh. The system still is used, as seen in the conscription of the Atlantic Conveyor and QE2 in the Falklands War: the State had a claim. Either way, it still demonstrates a huge technological lead in mass production.

One major factor for the English lead in the Industrial revolution was the Armada. Queen Elizabeth 1 had become convinced the previous practice of conscripting trading ships was no longer feasible, and had seen for herself the problems of designs like the Vasa and Mary Rose. Prompted by privateers, she opted for smaller, faster ships, and started producing them in number. That led to standard designs of rigging blocks and a single contract for Artillery, to the former Cistercian Ironworks at Tintern Abbey, very close to the Ordnance Board's base at Monmouth. Architectural research is going on at the moment to the system of leats and races in the Amgidy Valley next to the Abbey (the Dominicans being masters at water management), with the result that the cannon on English ships all had similar sized ammunition and so could be resupplied off-the-shelf. The Spanish didn't: once one of their cannons had fired off its shot, it was useless. As a result, standardisation became part of Cromwell's arsenal, and England was more than 50 years ahead of the rest of Europe by the time of the Napoleonic wars. It took the French 200 years to come up with the Grimbeauval cannon system, for example. An additional factor was the Roman Catholic response to scientific innovation. Although Athanasius Kircher was near the cutting edge, science was seen as alchemical, and al-quimia was a Muslim craft, therefore heretical. When the same alchemist who'd got the Counts of Hoornes and Egmont executed for that reeason in 1568 resurfaced in 1618, he immediately demonstrated to Jan van Helmont, overthrowing the good Doctor's paracelsian thinking and starting him on the course of empirical observation, which led through his son, the fruit of celebrating his sudden wealth, becoming Leibnitz' mentor. Where the Inquisition could stop Galileo, nobody could stop Newton and the rest of Protestant Northern Europe. So where we had the Freemasonic Royal Society promoting steam, France had a wastrel monarchy playing shepherdesses. However, industrialisation sought efficiency, and efficiency wasn't always safety-conscious. As a result, quality declined, and craft skills gained an edge. This became significant in the 19th Century Arts-and-Crafts movement, which actually brought the sense of industry back up to scratch, through Quaker and Methodist bosses. It's a lesson we've never forgotten: our success in sorting the ventilator shortage in just 5 days in March last year has given British Industry its mojo back. Prince Philip had had a hand in that in the 1980s, working with my dad to create the cooedination mechanism. And that is why hand-made invokes craft detail. Tools are fitted to the individual, not the individual to the tool. As a result, a craftsman never has reason to blame his tools. He's their master. It may not have the cost-savings of mass production, but neither does it have its failings. Just as Hong Kong was a byeword for tat in the 1960s, so Chinese is now, for exactly the same reasons we purged in the 19th Century here, cutting too many corners. The result was Prince Albert's leadership of the extension of the Royal Society into all the Professions, setting up standards bodies in the same way the Renaissance craft guilds did. You get two out of three, pretty, quick and cheap. Which are you willing to forgo? Cheap Chinese may be unreliable. Good design working well, fast, won't come cheap. You might have to wait till the 12th of Never for that cheap tool doing the perfect job.

You've not seen me being critical, have you? I was once a Sergeant-Major. I'm not Mary Poppins, and gun hardware needs to stand up to the job. Be thankful...what I addressed is an issue. There's no way to sugar-coat it. In years to come you'll see.

Punched stitch holes and still it looks agh - sorry, but there's a point where corrective action's needed. About the only way that might work is braid-lacing the edges. Or use the laser to mark the line for stitching punches. Dampening the leather before sewing up's entirely up to you. It might help the stitching embed, but I'd use an edge groover first, to create a ditch for the stitching to lie in. It'll protect the thread, because I'd presume the holster will be used in the field in some shape or form.

I do, but not by so much as to break the thread. This is why we transfer the bobbin to niddy-noddy, to skein up for storage, it evens out tension and spin. I'm using an Ashord E3, electrical, for size. What I'll often do once I'm ready to ply is reload a bobbin from the skein, allowing me a further chance to increase the spin if I need. Given there's more fibre-workers here, a drum carder for wool creates a pad of generally-aligned fibres called a batt, which is gently eased apart. A sizeable wadge is passed through a size gauge called a diz, to become the starting point for spinning - it's dragged over comb cards to align and loosen, and feeds straight to the wheel.