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My apologies if I’m in the wrong section, this is my first time doing this. I work at a Leather supply store, and I have a full side of veg-tan with a beautiful Oregon Trail scenery tooled on it. It is a memorial piece, and I want to make sure that I mount it right and take care of it and preserve it in the best manners possible. I consider myself a general leatherworker, and while I’ve mounted things before, I haven’t done anything this intricately tooled or important, and I don’t do much tooling myself. I want to use a service protectant that won’t damage it or anything. My current plan is basically to glue it in the middle area down to a board to keep it flat and act as a kind of plaque, then use small decorative brass nails to tack down the edges and give it a look of being tacked to the board instead of glued. I was going to use Saddle-Lac spray to seal it, but was thinking that maybe I should use something liquid instead so that I can really work it into all the crevices and tooling. Would anybody recommend something to use, or if I should go with wax or acrylic? The story behind it is basically that about 15 years ago we gave a customer a side of veg-tan to tool a scenery on, they disappeared for 15 years, and the side just came back to us with the news that the artist had passed some years back. It is slightly unfinished, with the wagontrain fading into the mountains. Wonderfully appropriate.

I have a whole lot of dies for setting rivets, stamps and other tools that I have collected over the years. All of them are hand held. Now I'm thinking of getting a small arbor press for some of that work. I would like to mount the dies I have in the arbor press. Several of the dies are hand made for custom projects and it would be good to use them in the future. Have anyone any idea how to do that? I'm guessing some kind of chuck and somehow attaching that to the press?