leather face

LEATHER FACE

When was the last time you went to learn a new skill and ended up saving money?  Never, right?  It used to be, when there was actually a sense of community and walkable neighborhoods ( and correspondingly we weren’t a bunch of bitter loners ), a buddy or friend got with you and you bought him a six pack and he apprenticed you.  That was how I learned how to do bike mechanics ( single speed only-all the gears and sprockets and cables and pads and derailers on multispeeds still confuse the hell out of me ).

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That is how I learned how to disassemble various firearms.  Hey, I make NO claims to having any aptitude towards mechanical movement.  As embarrassing as that was, it is about par for the course.  Now I’m pretty good with a lot of stuff like that, doing a lot of repairs on the apartments, but it wasn’t a natural fit for me.  So, when it came to leather work, I SHOULD have been less reluctant to learn.  I had some experience when I was a wee lad, although it was doing everything ass backwards as it turned out.  I was just following my lifetime reluctance to learn repairs.

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I’d be the last person to tell you learning them wasn’t very useful.  It is amazing the money you can save and the independence you gain for even the most fundamental DIY skills.  I just haven’t overcome my long standing reluctance to understand that even as I’ve learned it ( “I know you’re listening to me, but you aren’t hearing me” ).  I had wanted to learn leather crafting, but as I had about two projects I wanted to undertake, I kept putting off doing so.  It seemed a lot of effort for a knife sheath ( OMG, Becky, a minion sent me the sweetest knife ever as a gift, and it needed a sheath ) and a bayonet frog.

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For those who have mistakenly believed semi-auto is a suitable substitute for a bayonet ( all those Alibi Ike’s using every excuse in the book to deny the greatness of military bolt action guns are now out of luck as the reasonable prices dried up and everything is collector grade price, even for the crap ), you may not understand what a bayonet frog is.  It is simply the attachment on your belt that holds the bayonet sheath.  I kept putting off getting one because the price was a bit too high, and I kept putting off making one because I had no leather working tools.

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Slowly but surely over the last year I bought in onesies and twosies the necessary tools.  Yes, I know, if I had not bought a few books I could have done this long ago.  In my defense, almost nothing gets in the way of books.  I eat less delicious foods in favor of buying books.  Well, I did.  As I just explained I’ve finally cut that amount way down so as to put away the last bit of saving I can before the economy implodes.  What I’m doing today is sharing this experience with you so you understand that I wasted a lot of money on tools and leather trying to learn this skill.

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Why, oh why, might you ask, should I give a care about leather working?  The raw material cost is so high it almost seems insane to pursue the craft.  A strip of leather for a belt is $15.  A one foot by one and a half foot square of stiff leather is $20.  The only reason I care is that on principle I hate canvas and I absolutely loathe that melt and form plastic nonsense.  Leather is a functional old-timey craft we’ll need to return to soon enough ( canvas uses cropland, cows eat grass on land unable to grow human food-you do the math ). 

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Now, before I begin, PLEASE do not even remotely think what I’m going to tell you is a tutorial on leather working.  It isn’t.  I leave out a lot of tools and material that can make other leather items.  This is just my experience with an introduction,  one project leather working.  I don’t cover the other needed items like rivets or quality longer lasting techniques.  What you can take away from this is how easy it is to get started.  As in one fifth of my costs.  You won’t make anything pretty-it is not suitable to turn you into a master so as to give leather gifts  or charge money for your items.  But it will churn out some functional items.

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A bayonet frog is, essentially, two strips of leather joined in two loops.  The first vertical loop is to rest the frog on your belt.  The horizontal loop attaches to the front of the first loop and holds the sheath.  I started with this project first for its simplicity ( and I only started anyway since I got my everyday combat carry belt-which was replacing my inadequate M1 Garand style ammo belt-assembled and the lack of the frog became glaring.  As per a previous discussion, my “always on” belt contains a knife, two cartridge pouches and a bayonet, and that is it.  I don’t believe in carrying the kitchen sink just because I might need it ).

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I had a brain fart and realized I didn’t even need all that expensive leather I had bought.  I had screwed up and got too thin of leather ( basically, for clothing ) and I hated to use a significant portion of my stiff leather, as this was a training project.  Luckily, I had not thrown away an old pair of leather combat boots ( unfortunately, I HAD tossed several pairs of cowboy boots with fake lowers but real leather uppers ).  The boots were SOOOO comfortable and only $55, but the bottoms wore down in less than a year and they were worthless.  I only accidentally saved them as I put them with other items and stashed the box.

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So, I don’t know how long it took to tear apart the stitching of the boots and reclaim the leather sides, but the whole project did take three plus hours.  Just to stitch two loops of leather together.  That is ridiculously long for what I did, but I did learn to sew leather, and I got free leather to do so.  And for Amateur Hour, the frog turned out looking pretty sharp ( the boot leather seemed thick enough but the frog ended up drooping under the weight of the bayonet.  I took a long boot lace and looped it around the frog and the web gear belt, stiffening it and fastening it to the belt so it doesn’t slide.  It looks ugly now, but perhaps I’ll need some emergency cord one day ).

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To make up for the too thin leather, no rivets and no glue, I just double stitched everything.  The leather sewing awl turned out to be useless, since the needle kept popping out pulling the needle back through, so I just used the needle by itself.  Make sure to order “leather sewing awl needles” and not just plain “leather needles”.  The awl type has the hole on the bottom rather than the top.  $5 for a set.  To make using the needles easy, I used a “drillable awl”.  Think a thin screwdriver with the tip a point. 

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I just took a rubber mallet and beat the wooden handle to drive the steel through both leather pieces and then you don’t have to fight too hard to push the needle through ( mallet, $7 and awl $8 for a set ).  I just set the needle in the smaller hole and pushed the leather against the needle which had its back on the cutting board.  Pulling it back out was a bit of work.  The thread was easy.  I ordered a “284 yard leather sewing waxed thread” unit for a ridiculously low $4 with free shipping.  Caution, it took two months on the slow boat from China.

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For a knife, you want the “skiving knife”, $9.  It works so much better than an X-Acto knife.  No aching fingers and just sharpening rather than replacing.  I did have a “lacing chisel set” but those were worthless.  They did poorly punching through and I just ended up using them as a placement guide for the stitching ( they have a tool for that, looks like a wheel like on a cowboy’s spurs ). All In all, I only needed $30 in tools for plain, cut and sew only projects ( yes, I know you need to score the stitch line.  I didn‘t. It was blindly attempt this or forever wait for all the perfect tools necessary ).  And you can even use the mallet on other items like your bullet puller.

END ( today's related link http://amzn.to/2G6cBva )

 

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