How To Make A Stamp Made Of Leather(?)

[Rayban]

It's been quite a while ago, but I remember reading about how someone made an impression in leather by using a stamp made of leather...confused yet?

For instance, make an impression of something in leather....the image will of course be reversed...then heat...actually "bake", if my memory serves me..... using the leather stamp to make impression on another leather surface...follow?

The leather turned very hard when baked.

Anyway, there seemed to be a formula such as "bake for 1/2 hr @ 200 degrees" or something like that.

Anyone recall this post, or perhaps have some experience in what I'm trying to describe?

Thanks

[Bob Blea]

Hi Rayban,

I don't know of a process where you bake the leather. There is a common technique in floral carving of making a 'tap off'. You would carve the pattern you wanted (say a section of a belt design) in cased leather, and then let that dry. You only do the swivel knife cuts, no tooling needed. After it dries, give it several coats of Neat Lac and let it dry. This gives you a reversed image of the final design you want to carve. Then, you case a belt and place this carving on top of it and 'tap' (actually you have to hit is pretty hard in my experience) the design into the cased leather. The carved lines create a raised image on the cased belt that you carve with a swivel knife, kind of like a Craftaid.

It's a great technique for reproducing belt patterns or other things you will use again and again, but you can do the same thing with a floral pattern. In the Sheridan Style carving book they show using this same technique with flower elements to lay out a pattern on wet leather. In this case you are tapping the flower designs into the leather and then drawing the vinework for everything else.

This probably isn't exactly what you were thinking of, but maybe it helps.

Bob

[Rayban]

That's helpful Bob, thanks.

I have an experiment in progress..got one in the oven!......to see how it's hardened.

I'll post results with pix if it turns out ok.

Thanks again.

[Rayban]

I think I'm on the right track....I pressed an old belt buckle of mine onto a wet piece of 8oz veg tan, of course the image is inverted......I then soaked it in water a couple minutes.....set the oven at 350. I just eyeballed it to see that it was dry (only took about 10 minutes). When it was dry, it was very hard..I let it cool.

I then press it onto another wet piece of scrap, and I'm pretty happy with the results. Looks like it can be re-used over and over.

I used a one-ton arbor press to do the pressing.

[Bob Blea]

That's exactly the idea of a tap off. Sounds like the baking worked out really well. You will still want to coat the baked leather with something like Clear Lac or Resolene just to keep it from absorbing moisture from the cased leather, otherwise it will eventually ruin the impression. But it looks good!

Bob

[jessebeckham]

the guy here seems to be using something similar to layout his belt design at the beginning of this video.

[Rayban]

Bob, point well taken on the finish...I'll do the Resoline for now.

[WScott]

Thanks for discussing this guys, learned something new and useful today!

[Les No6]

Interesting cant see a use for myself but an idea on treating to make it last longer is two part resin like what is used in fiber glass this sets into a hard plastic I have some and will give it a try, always love a good experiment.

[TwinOaks]

The idea of hardening the leather like that is pretty much the same for most types of wet forming, so there's definitely some precedence behind it. And Les' comment got me to thinking....I find it likely that leather was used for this because of the lack of availibility of fast setting resins casting like we can get today. The one thing that leather shops DID have handy was scrap leather, so it became the medium of choice. Nice find on the technique!

I might be time to go visit the modelling section of Hobby Lobby.....