Vein lines in leather

[Corvus]

Is there a way of smoothing out vein lines in leather? I don't see them in finished leather items in shops. Parts of the hides I have are free of them but lots of perfectly good parts of the leather have them running through it. Is this the same in all leather or does it depend on the quality or part e.g shoulder, butt etc that you buy?

[CitizenKate]

Personally, I love vein and fat wrinkles, and finish the leather to accentuate them. But a lot of people like their leather nice and smooth, too. One way to smooth out any irregularities on the surface of the leather is glassing. Here is a link to a topic where the technique for doing that was discussed:

http://leatherworker.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=6593

Kate

[hidepounder]

Corvus,

One of the benefits of slicking your leather before and after you case it is that it removes marks like this. I prefer a glass slicker but a good hardwood or plastic slicker will work fine.

Hope this helps....

Bobby

[Go2Tex]

What you are looking for is a tight grained leather, if you can get it. Seems to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, but is the industry just producing fatter beef and thus more fat wrinkles in our skirting as opposed to years past? Some of you old hats might have some insight on this.

You will tend to have more blemishes or imperfections like this on the neck and stretchy areas normally, so keep this in mind when selecting your piece to work, but sometimes it's hard to find a nice clean spot on oven no.1 grade. I guess it depends on your source and your buying power.

[Corvus]

Thank you for your replies, very helpful as usual

I'll get to work on making a slicker.

[bruce johnson]

It may be just what we have been taught to call them by whoever we learned from. I was taught and read vein lines are on the flesh side of full thickness sides. You can use these vein line patterns to pair up reins on unpslit sides. The wrinkles on the grain side are called fat wrinkles. They are not necessarily fat in origin though. These hides are coming off areas of the cattle that are not flat and have some looser fiber from movement on the living cow. To process these hides are stretched and worked to be flat. Some of these heavier shouldered cattle have a lot of bulge that will work down but have some wrinkles from compressing. Some of the older thinner cows get wrinkles right over the top of their necks and shoulders from head down to eat, head up to look around and move the flies, head back down, etc. Those wrinkles are pretty linear across the shoulders. These wrinkles indicate to me stretchier areas that may be an issue with the project or might be an advantage if they are oriented with a fold.

[gtwister09]

I'm with Bruce on the names...that's what we were taught by the butchers. However, the worst lines that I have ever seen on the grain side of a hide came from several skinny Holstein milk cows. So based on those I don't believe that it is was actually fat that created fat wrinkles either.

Regards,

Ben

Edited October 11, 2009 by gtwister09

[Go2Tex]

I'm with Bruce on the names...that's what we were taught by the butchers. However, the worst lines that I have ever seen on the grain side of a hide came from several skinny Holstein milk cows. So based on those I don't believe that it is was actually fat that created fat wrinkles either.

Regards,

Ben

So much for names. Might have absolutely nothing to do with fat, but that's what the tanneries and distributers call them, and it seems to me the occurance of them is on the increase of late. Maybe it's like stretch marks. Those skinny Holsteins were maybe a lot fatter at one point in their life and they got stretch marks, eh Ben? heh heh.... kinda makes sense. Any relation to the gender of the donor and the incidence of these wrinkles or stretch lines? I don't mean your Holsteins, Ben. I mean any other hides where bulls or beef cattle were included in the sample. Might be a correlation between breeds, gender, etc.

Edited October 11, 2009 by Go2Tex

[gtwister09]

Brent,

To answer your question about them being fat at one time and knowing the dairy that they came from. The simple answer would be No. They were never fat at this dairy...that would have meant that they were wasting feed.

At one time that idea about breeds and such interested me as well so I asked the same question. They had other dairy breeds like Devons, Guernseys, Swiss, Jerseys, Aryshires and various crosses to name a few that came through as well. They also had crosses of them as well as with beef cattle breeds like Brangus, Herefords and so forth. These guys also had Angus, Brangus, Herefords, Maine-Anjou, Santa Gertrudis, Simmental, Charolais, Beefmaster, Chianina, Limousin and the various crosses come through as well and tracked the look and feel of hides for years.

They had a thought at the time that cattle who were fed in troughs (like feedlots and dairy farms) were more apt to this marking due to the rapid influx of protein but they were still gathering information and I never checked back with their experiment but they had several hundred hides at that time to make it a viable supposition and almost 95% confirmation of that supposition. Unfortunately they are out of business and I have not kept up with them.

Now you know all that I know...which isn't much.

Regards,

Ben

[Go2Tex]

Now you know all that I know...which isn't much.

Regards,

Ben

Well, it may not seem like much to you but it's a hell-of-lot to me. Thanks. So, it's not the fat exactly but the protein and more particularly the way it's fed at the feed lots, which probably account for the fast majority of the domestic hides on the market these days, right? Could we safely infer then, that these lines are caused by rapid growth associated with feedlots?

Whatever the cause and by whatever name they should be called, here's an example of the marks on a seat from the heart of a side of Hermann Oak. They aren't deep and will not look that bad or detract too much from the finished product, but I'd prefer not to have them right across my seats, frankly. It was an order from a distributor who will remain unnamed, but it is a problem with the TR grade system I suspect. Sometimes you win and sometimes you get what you get.