Edging embossed epi leather

[Ben00]

You also said you hand skive the outside edges of the norbuck and croc skin specifically to avoid valleys between the leather. As i would like to keep my leather an even thickness on both sides, what would be the minimum amount of thickness you would ever go to, to insure there is no dip between the strips. 
apologies for all the questions, you just appear to be one of the few guys doing similar work that I want to learn. Thanks again really appreciate it. 
 

best BN

[TomE]

Not to muddy the waters, but have you trimmed the edge square before starting the edge finishing process?  With veg tan I use a round knife or piece of broken glass ("glassing the edge") to level the edge before any sanding or finishes.  I normally do this before sewing, but when using a machine on a raised leather strap I sew it then trim the edge close to the stitch line. 

[RockyAussie]

@Ben00 you said above to quote  "You also said you hand skive the outside edges of the norbuck and croc skin specifically to avoid valleys between the leather".

This had me lost and searching for where you may have gotten this idea. I believe it may be a misunderstanding from what I wrote in the watch band tutorial as below.

"This one below shows the skiving done on the straps with the Fortuna and a little hand skiving to achieve no thickness on the ends. This is done to minimise getting any holes in the valleys."

What I was meaning to convey there was that the skiving machine can not skive the crocodile down to zero at the edge without getting some chopping out where the valleys are between the scales. The only part done by hand with the skiving was the ends with a boot makers knife.

On 7/10/2022 at 3:23 PM, Ben00 said:

As i would like to keep my leather an even thickness on both sides, what would be the minimum amount of thickness you would ever go to, to insure there is no dip between the strips. 

Generally I don't go any thinner than around 1.2mm combined as mentioned in the watchband tutorial example. The thinner your edges are the quicker and easier the edging is to do. The dress belts I do will often be around 2mm at the edge and the hornback croc ones are around 4mm at the edge. The dress belt ones you can see some of the making of in this following video and note that the high profile on them is achieved by putting a filler strip between the layers -

 

On 7/10/2022 at 3:11 PM, Ben00 said:

Thank you for the feedback, I bought a weller wood burning kit which is 30w and it comes with a few straight tips nothing curved like you have, but I’m wondering if I can get some scrapes I’ve had off of my epi embossed leather, otherwise can I cover over the marks with edge paint? What do you normally do in this situation

It appears that you are getting some burn marks on the painted areas and that is not a normal thing. Is the paint you are using behaving like the paint being ironed in this video? The paint should flow around like putty when it goes correctly and allow the reshaping and filling of holes fairly easily. In this video the heat is too high in my opinion. Sometimes if you go higher up above the tip can help as well if the tip is over hot. The soldering irons I use are 60 watt and I get ones with the bigger tips to enable me to shape them as I do.

I mentioned that I use a light dimmer switch to control the temperature, I do this by putting the dimmer switch and a power plug with light into a box as shown below. The hotter the iron, the brighter the light shows which helps a little. I mark an ideal position onto control part when I have found a good average position.

The burn marks you have should be able to be sanded off and scothbrited. It will take some time to get competent with it.