Leescustomleather

An old and inexpensive way is to make Iron acetate, just put steel wool into white vinegar until it no longer dissolves. It reacts with the tannin in the leather oxidizing it. At first the leather will turn gray then darker the more you apply all the way to jet black. After the leather dries the vinegar smell goes away. It is very inexpensive and works great with no obvious side effects after a period of five years .I hope this helps.

What type of finish and what type of leather Please?

I imagine it is good steel but being a blade that is already made means that it has been hardened. You could cut it with an abrasive cutting wheel on an angle grinder but the heat of cutting would cause the steel to lose its hardness near the area that was cut, meaning the most used area on a head knife, the corners. You could normalize the whole blade , shape it and then reharden and temper it which can be done but it is probably more work that you want to do. If you want to do it I can tell you how. I make knives, that is how I started working with leather, making sheaths

I don't use Edge paint, on something like a sheath it has a tendency to wear away and then the exposed Edge looks bad. This small sample was done with fiebing's leather dye and Seiwa leather craft Tokonole, from the website Goods Japan. It is a burnishing agent and you can dye through it

chuck123wapati Thank you I just tried many different ways, not applying glue all the way up to the outside edge so that it doesn't show after being sanded, Polishing and inspecting between sanding and repeat several times. But after what immiketoo posted it looks like there is still room for improvement

As a bladesmith I wanted to do my own Sheath's, after about a year I thought I was doing pretty good then I got a side gig making sheaths for a high-end knife maker of 35 years. Through their constructive criticism my leather work improved a great deal but I was continually frustrated with trying to burnish the edges of the sheet where multiple layers of leather came together , you could always see the glue lines. I tried many things and ( edge paints ) watched tons of YouTube videos but was never satisfied with the quality. So I started experimenting and have started to see some success. The process takes time and patience but that's okay if I end up with a high-quality product. Here is a photo of the result. This is two layers of 8 oz veg tan. You can still see the separation and spots but it's not obvious anymore I would really appreciate any tips anyone has to share, thank you.

There are types of stainless steels that have weak to no magnetic attraction . I personally don't care for stainless because they require a harder abrasive to grind a proper bevel and they are more time consuming to get a very sharp edge. Plus I prefer the patina of a good used high carbon steel blade. That all said a piece of good quality 4 to5 oz. veg-tan leather glued to a very flat board with some polishing compound rubbed on will do wonders to give you a very sharp edge.