Mablung

@JTMW, are you asking where to find a essentially a really big roller buckle without the tang?

Beautiful work! The tooling is great; looking at your shading especially, as I'm just learning to do that and trying to get it down. Your daughter's paint work is great as well. Two thumbs up.

What sort of carving? A ornate floral, simple figure, something in between? And how much detail do you put into the wet molding? Every line of the implement, or more of just a general shaping? The detail and whether you want the front piece to be more decorative or to supply more retention make a difference in what you carve and on what sorts of pieces.

Seriously. I didn't realize how difficult it is to pear shade smoothly until I was trying on this thing. Thanks. Hopefully I'll get it at least stained tonight, though I probably won't finish the rest of the construction until either later this week or sometime next week.

Thank you. I’m looking forward to staining it and finishing the construction. I’m going to experiment with some Angelus Gel Antique to stain and antique it; we’ll see how it goes. The sheath needs a little revamping in terms of construction design, so it’ll probably get redone, but I’m looking forward to finishing this version.

Definitely not finished yet and very much in progress and very much flawed. But I rather enjoyed doing the leaf on this thing. I got carried away with the cuts on the acorns, but I can change that on the next iteration. I’m proud of my tooling progress, which is why this one is in the “Show Off” forum, but I’m always looking for suggestions on how to improve, so critique away. (Ignore the bevel line on the right side—that was me practicing with a new beveled, and that’ll get stitched through on the back. This sheath is much more a practice piece.)

Wow, what a concept…I mean, if that’s how you turn animal hides into shoes, where do the leather ones in the stores come from?

The PT92 is really a great gun. I’d not trade my Czech peashooter, but I also have a nice personal attachment to that gun now. I’ve carried this gun the last year and a half, eight years total, soon as I could get a carry permit. Glock, terrible pseudo 1911 briefly, an HK VP9 for four and a half years, another souped-up Glock, which now trades out from time to time with my CZ. Got great personal connections to all three of my carry guns. Like the Marine sniper says about his rifle. I really, really have an itch to shoot…if I lived near Wyoming, I’d go with you, lol.

I have a souped-up Glock 19 I carry as well, in addition to a couple other plastic guns. My 19 looks good, if you’re into hard, angular lines, but it just doesn’t have the same aesthetics as my CZ. I don’t generally think very highly of Taurus, but I have yet to hear anything bad about the G3c. A friend has I think a G2c, and the front sight screw came a bit loose, allowing the sight to spin around backwards, when shot. I gave him a lecture, spun the sight back around, and put some threadlocker on it. That annoyance aside, he said it was fairly accurate, for its small size. Give me my Glock or CZ any day, though. Head shots at 50 yards and body shots at 100 with either one.

I remember hearing about the dangers of cellphone radiation a number of years ago, but then the subject seemed to disappear. Interestingly enough, I was just thinking about it again the other day. Probably a year ago or so, there was some murmuring over the move to 5G networks and their corresponding greater power that would seem to bring along more intense RF radiation, but I haven’t heard anything else about it. Seems there’s a research project in there. I suspect lots of things may be slowly killing us, in ways we don’t understand. This is probably one of them. So maybe I need to go make myself a cell phone holster to inhibit my ever-constant cellular companion’s effects. (The assistant manager of my local Tandy carries his phone in a case attached to the front of his belt, but I suspect that’s more about keeping stuff out of his pockets than anything else.)

Huh, didn’t know that. In terms of plain old distance, the hip holster wouldn’t be much farther away physically. I wonder why it being out of the pocket makes a difference.

Fixed my length problem (most of it, anyway), by cutting the toe stitching and pulling out the toe “puff”—Tanner’s Bond Cement didn’t hold as tightly as I thought it would. Anyway, these little boots are now significantly more comfortable.

Lol. I like shooting .45, though I confess to carrying 9mm. My typical carry gun is a semi-custom CZ 75 P-01 Omega, though, with green and black grips, so it’s a lot prettier than that horrid Ruger.

Good work across the board. That Ruger is an ugly gun…

Lovely work! I carry my phone in my back pocket and pull it out if I sit down. Don’t know if that’ll make any difference for you, now that you have a fantastic belt holster for it.

Oh, I see. Hmm. If I recall correctly, Resolene partially soaks in but also stays on the surface to an extent. You may be able to redye the worn spots, if the Resolene has been worn off sufficiently as well. I can't say I have tried that myself, though, so I really don't know for sure what would happen. Resolene is acrylic-based, not oil, so buffing the spot with rubbing alcohol may not work. I'll think on it, though I'm not experienced in these areas.

Don't blame you. That would be tough. I just resharpen my replaceable blades.

I think it borders on heresy to suggest one could have too many knives, so I'm glad to see you stick to orthodoxy. Gosh, now I want to get a cylinder of mapp gas and try my hand at some basic blacksmithing... A buddy of mine used to do some amateur blacksmithing on a small forge his dad built him and was going to teach me some basics one day. His coal and paper were a touch damp from rain a couple days before and bad Southern humidity, so we weren't able to, sadly.

There was a recent post (or maybe I just read it recently) about the Weaver burnisher machine and how people had modified it. I'll see if I can find the thread. In the meantime, if you dig through the archives or search Google for something like "site:leatherworker.net burnish machine," you'll find some good information already out there. Others may have some more up-to-date suggestions, too, though.

"Me too" on wanting to see the blade. Also, how do you hang it around your neck?

What are the blade dimensions? I'm not very good at judging things spatially and don't have a great sense of the scale from the closeup photos.

I picked up that idea from you and have found it most helpful indeed. I got an obnoxious cut on my finger from a dull awl that punched through the second layer of a piece rather violently, when I didn't use the cork. THAT taught me to use the cork religiously.

Yeah, those can have fragile handles. That and because they’re generally rather light, we’uns tend to over stress the handles by whacking things really hard. Good opportunity for an upgrade

I like it. Mainly used for detail cutting in small-ish areas, trimming, or other purposes?

Re: applying and buffing, I also use a rag. I just have to let it dry for a minute first. I have read on here that sheepskin is the bee’s knees for antique, but I haven’t tried it personally. Did you have one of the wooden mallets? Definitely need something better. I would drop the coin on a rawhide mallet, if I were you. I spent a little less and got a Tandy Bakelite mallet—then I used a Tandy rawhide mallet in a carving class recently and wished I had bought one already.