Pancake Holster Design Questions

[Dfarm]

Hi all, I am pretty new to the leather scene and I have a couple of questions on designing the pancake style holster.

I want to build a couple of these holsters, but I have run into a mental road block as far as designing and assembling one goes. On the few holsters that I have built, I have wet formed them before I dyed, glued, and sewn them. When I build a flat backed holster, I cut the back piece out the size I want the holster to be, then cut the front side very over sized and wet form to the gun, then after the leather is dry, I glue it to the back and trim the excess off before sewing.

From what I can tell, it looks like the correct way to build this style of holster is to cut the pieces out, then glue and sew together, then wet form. My disconnect is; how do I measure how much to over size the front panel (or both panels if making a holster that is blocked on the back side too ) to leave room for wet forming?

Thanks for any help!

[Big O]

Seems to me it'd be pretty much the same as figuring stitch lines.

For a flat-backed pancake, add the width of the gun plus twice the thickness of the leather. For a pancake molded on both sides, half that.

[Dfarm]

Laying out stitch lines before wet-forming is a foreign concept to me as well. Lol. Are there any good tutorials floating around that cover this?

[malabar]

Laying out stitch lines before wet-forming is a foreign concept to me as well. Lol. Are there any good tutorials floating around that cover this?

A lot of this depends on your particular style of holster making. I make almost all of my holsters with a flat back and the molding on the front. To do that, the outer plate (piece of leather) has to be significantly wider than the inner plate. I do all of my holsters from templates. I start with paper, and when I'm satisfied with hos it works, I transfer it to a more rigid material. The template for the outer plate is typically 3/4" to 1.25" wider than for the inner plate. The correct value is roughly the thickness of the gun. And revolvers can be tricky, because you need more material around the cylinder than the barrel, so the shape can be slightly different as well.

If you build a holster in this fashion, you have to add the stitch lines AFTER glue up. I have a template for all of the handguns I work with. I put the gun in the holster, correctly oriented, and then overlay and offset the template to get the location for the stitch line. It's kind of a fussy method, but it gives you a real good fit up.

tk

[Dfarm]

Thanks for the replies.

@ Malabar, are you wet forming your holsters after they are glued up and sewn, or are you wet forming the front panel before the glue up?