How To Make A LEATHER SHEATH | Full & Detailed Tutorial | Knife Making

alrighty guys today we're going to be doing a detailed step-by-step tutorial on how to make a leather pouch sheath for your custom knives i'm going to be drawing on experience and lessons that i have learned from paul long dave ferry and jason at diomedes industries the first and arguably the most important step of the sheaf building process is going to be laying out your template start by tracing your knife on the piece of paper around one half to five eighths of an inch away from your center line this will depend greatly on the thickness of the handle and you'll get a feel for it the more sheaths that you make then measure off around two to two and a half finger links from the back end of the knife so that that will be your draw distance and that will be the top of your sheath drop a vertical line down to the widest part of your blade about three thirty seconds to two 30 seconds away from the widest part of your blade and then trace that same distance around your entire blade in this case we're going to be doing a butterfly type design so i'll go up the spine of the knife as well then i normally put in around a one-half of an inch welt so you just saw me measure off the welt there and trace it all the way around at this point you have almost one full side of your sheath done the next step will be to fold the template in half and then trace this on the other side of the sheet to get a nice trace it's ideal to have a little bit of a light source on the back end of your sheet template you can use a very fancy light box you can use a computer monitor screen in my case i used my cell phone on the notes section and then turned off the lights this allowed me to get a mirror image on the other side of the paper once you have your rough mirror image on the other side of the paper you can turn the lights back on and sure up and clean up the lines that you traced the last part of the template is going to be putting in a belt loop now i generally shoot for a belt loop between 1 and 1 8 of an inch wide the distance between the center line and the beginning of the belt loop is around one half of an inch and the distance between the outside of the sheath and the belt loop is around three quarters of an inch but i think the half inch measurement is more important and i normally start there and then measure how wide i want my belt loop to be you can see me using a punch here to trace my radius i'm going to be attempting to use this punch to punch a nice radius in that section of the template so i decided to use it as a stencil as well the belt loop length will be between three and three quarters of an inch and four inches from the mouth of the sheaf once we have our template made we will be cutting out rough blocks from our hide this is seven to eight ounce leather from wicked and craig and it is pre-dyed to brown i normally make these rough cuts with a box cutter and then get these large blocks of leather over to my workbench so that i can transpose the sheath template onto the leather with an awl so i just put a bunch of little dots through my template onto the flesh side of the sheath and this allows me to see my template on the sheath using the punch i punch out the radiuses this worked pretty good it's a fairly low quality punch so i think a higher quality punch may have done a better job but it did allow me to get some decent radiuses there i then used my custom head knife that i built recently to cut out the rest of the sheath there is some technique with these head knives and i'm definitely not a pro yet so it's going to take me a while to get a little more confident using this head knife to make single hard passes on these leather sheets but it did a decent job and the more time that you spend in this part of the process the better off your end product is going to turn out what you see me doing here is skiving down the welt so that it is around 50 of its total width on the side that will be going into the fold so i just use a very cheap skiver there this is a good time to clean up the edges along the top of your sheet so along the mouth and the belt loop of your sheath go ahead and take a number two edge beveler and bevel them out and start finishing your edges what i normally do the finished edges is either use quick slick or saddle soap on the edge and then start off with some 220 grit sandpaper i normally move up to around 600 grit sandpaper in this process to make the edge nice and slick then using these super cheap burnishers dremel burnishers i put them in my drill press and get a nice burnished edge along the top of the sheath and the belt loop so the first time i saw one of these things used was on the stock and barrel leather craft channel it's a pretty sweet little contraption you put your die into it and then you can apply it to the edges of your leather craft very easily so i gave it a test in this project it's pretty simple to figure out just know that there are left-handed threads on the top of this thing so you don't have to fight it to get it off but once i got the dye in there you can just press the little mechanism down and it will start feeding dye to the tip of this applicator so i found it worked pretty good and it allowed me to apply the dye to the edges of this project nice and easily a pro tip from mr dave ferry was to use pro carve when casing your leather when you plan on doing some tooling you're supposed to mix one part of this stuff with 10 parts of water i got a little aggressive and i mixed one part with nine parts of water we're going to be using this stuff to case our leather for our basket weave and also to put our maker's mark stamped into the back of the sheath before stamping the makers mark into the sheath i wanted to mark out where my belt loop will land i like the belt loop to land somewhere on the handle of the knife so that it is in a nice semi-flat spot this is the stamp that i got from ghost graphics it's a plastic 3d printed stamp and it was fairly reasonably priced i'm using an arbor press to press my stamp into the back of the sheath i found that in this scenario i didn't quite case sheath enough so this mark isn't as deep as i would have liked it to be so in the future i will try to do that better once i have my mark in i'll use some calipers to mark out the distance from the edge of the sheath that i'll be doing my tooling this will be about twice the distance from my stitch line so around a half of an inch i'm not quite sure what this tool is called but i just went around my border there to make it a little bit deeper with that manual little round bald tool we're going to be using three different stamps and tooling process here i'm going to be using this seed stamp or cedar i guess in the corners and then i'll be using a camouflage stamp along the entire border this camouflage stamp is probably about 25 years old and it is just a standard tandy seven dollar camouflage stamp but it gets the job done very nicely so i get the entire border camouflaged first and then we're going to be doing some basket weaving in the middle i'm getting a chance to use my new leather maul and it is actually doing a darn good job so that's worth noting to start off the basket weave process i scribe a very light line down the center of the sheath diagonally which will be our target and i wanted to point out that i'm using this japan a select basket weave stamp and it is way better than the tandy stamp that i was using it has a very deep impression and with the flat sides it's nice and easy to line up to that center line also it's nice and thick in the shaft so i can hit it easily with my maul and not get any miss hits so i was very impressed with the quality of this stamp i got it off of amazon and i will put an affiliate link in the description below if you want to pick one up for yourself basically you follow that line down alternating to the right and the left of the line and then you just start connecting the tails of your basket weave stamp until you have the entire area filled i am pretty new to leather tooling so this took me a very long time i was actually quite surprised how long this process took but here's a close-up shot of the finished product from kind of an angled view there so you can see how deep the stamp was after we get our tooling done we will use a heat gun or if you have a hair dryer that would work just as well to dry off the entire sheath we'll then apply some oil to the places that will be difficult for us to get oil on later that's some neat foot oil that is a pro tip from mr paul law next we'll put some barge contact cement on where we plan on putting down our belt loop hammer it down and mark where our stitch line will be i like using a washer to create a round stitch line in this location i think it looks nice and smooth and i got that from jason at diomedes industries i like how he does that using some super cheap pricking irons i just gently mark out where my hole spacing will be and then i put a needle into my drill press and push through the holes in the locations that were marked by the pricking wire i like how the drill press with a needle just pushes through the hole and it doesn't really remove any materials so the next step will be stitching our belt loop i actually got this needle knotting method from jeremy at simple little life he was the first channel that i saw anyone do this with and basically you thread the thread through the eye of the needle and then puncture that thread with the needle and pull that punctured thread down and over the eye of the needle this creates a little slip knot there that holds the thread onto each needle you'll do this on both sides of your thread when it comes to how much thread to use for your saddle stitch a good rule of thumb is to cut around nine to ten times the distance that you'll be saddle stitching i've been using some john james saddlers needles and these things have done a great job for me so far i have been rougher on these needles than i probably should be and they have not broke on me yet so to do a locking saddle stitch i normally insert my right-handed needle first and then make a cross by putting the left-handed needle under the right-handed needle pull them both through pull the thread to one side of the hole and put the left-hand needle into the hole then wrap the right set of thread around that needle and pull taut so this is the saddle stitch process that you will use not only for the belt loop of your sheath but also for stitching in the welt of your sheath i'll show a few different views here so you can get the idea of how to do this it takes a while to kind of get in the groove with the saddle stitching process but once you do it's almost therapeutic once we get all the way around the belt loop i'll do one or two back stitches then cut the thread and burn the tips pushing the edges of the tips into the stitching groove this makes it lay nice and flat on the inside of your sheath so that you don't risk cutting it with your knife as far as the backstitching goes i'll go into a little bit more detail with that on the weld part of this build process we'll now be going to a fairly precarious part of the sheath build process and that is going to be folding the pouch sheath over we will put two coats of barge contact cement on all of the surfaces that will be contacted to each other we'll put the welt down on one side of the sheath then apply a layer of barged cement onto the top of that well allow it to dry and get a little bit tacky and then do our best to line up both sides of the sheath with the welt in this case i cut the weld to have a little bit of extra space on the outside to be ground and cut away in a perfect world i think it would be easier to meet up all three of these pieces together if you had your welt perfectly cut out to its final dimensions once i have everything glued together i use my head knife to cut out the excess material on the outside of the welt and then i will use my belt grinder with a fresh 220 grit belt to flatten and level all three of these surfaces whatever grits you use make sure that the belt that you're using for this part of the process is a dedicated belt for leather work and stored probably away from your general knife grinding area once you have the edge of your sheath ground level and flat you can use an edge beveler to knock off the edge that you create with the grinding process in this case i am using a number four edge beveler i like the number four in this case because it gives a little bit more of a radius on the outside of your sheath and that is another tip that i picked up from mr dave ferry the next step will be to lay down our stitching groove and to do this i'll be using a groover from tandy i'll mention here that i'm putting links to all of these leather crafting tools in the description below that were used in this project in order to help out anyone who's getting in to the leather making game i will also mention in full disclosure that these are affiliate links and the channel will get a kickback if they are used so if you want to help out the channel go ahead and use those links for your leather crafting tool purchases after we have our stitch groove grooved in to the outside the sheath we will be using these sheet pricking irons to knock in some holes which we will be using as targets for our drill press so i would actually not recommend getting those cheap pricking irons if you're going to get pricking irons it may make sense to get some high quality ones but i guess these cheap ones do a good job for at least laying out my whole spacing so back to the drill press we're using a all needle or a fairly thick needle to puncture our holes it's not quite as thick as a finishing nail i've tried that in the past and i found that that was a little too wide of a hole for the thread that i was using you want to have a semi-tight fit with the thread in these holes you also saw me going back there with the stitch groover to groove the back of the sheath while i don't think this is necessary i like the idea of the stitches laying into a groove on the back of the sheath i will say that this can be fairly precarious at times because they do not line up perfectly with the front of the sheath sometimes and you have to be very careful when grooving the stitch groove on the back of the sheath so here you see me saddle stitching at the outside the sheath i will make it all the way around the sheath with 10 times the thread of the distance that i am saddle stitching and when i get to the last hole i'll be doing some back stitches when i do back stitches it is a very tight hole that you are pushing this needle through because it already has thread in it so i'll push it through and pull it through normally with a pair of pliers i'm sure this is not the right way to do it but it seems to do a decent job for me so i'll normally backstitch one or two back stitches cut the thread with a pair of scissors on the back side of the sheath and then burn the tips of the thread and push them down into the hole so that they are nice and flat and that kind of locks that stitch in we're then going to focus on finishing at the edges of the sheath this is probably one of the call marks for a custom sheath the time and tension that goes in to finishing up your edges so in this case i'm using some saddle soap on the edge and i'm starting with a piece of 320 grit sandpaper where i will at first sand in both directions and then finally sand in one direction going down the length of the sheath once we get the edge up to a 320 grit finish we will use a dauber to apply some neat split oil over the entire outside inside and edges of the sheath then using the heat gun we will heat up the sheath to enhance absorption of this neatsfoot oil we'll apply some more saddle soap to our edge and move on to a piece of 600 grit sandpaper and sand in one direction to make our edge nice and smooth this is where the edge lies at this point in the process once we have it up to a 600 grit finish in one direction we will dye our edges with the sweet applicator that we used earlier in the build i'm using some dark brown pro dye for my edges because i feel like this color matches the sides of my sheath fairly well you can also use black in this scenario and i think that looks pretty cool too this is the first time i put the knife in the sheath it has a nice fit it's not too tight that you have to fight it out but it has a very nice hold on the knife overall i'll then apply my final finish to the sheath which in this case will be back coat however you can also use tan coat and a litany of other leather finishes there are obviously a lot of opinions when it comes to leather finishes so just do a little research and pick the one you like the most so this is how the sheath turned out i'm actually very proud with this leather work i feel like my leatherwork overall has come a long way in the last six months it came from me not liking leather working at all i didn't really care to do it to actually enjoying the process so i'm obviously not a leather working pro but i feel like these shoes are up to a high enough level now that i'm not embarrassed to make them and show them to you guys so yeah that pretty much sums it up if you guys enjoyed this video or got something out of it please let me know in the comment section down below and also consider subscribing to the channel because that obviously will really help the channel grow and maybe will make this content more accessible to newer knife makers and like always until the next time i'll catch y'all on the flip side [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: Red Beard Ops

Views: 105,956

Keywords: red beard ops, knifemaker, knifemaking, knife maker, knife making, how to make a leather sheath, how to make a sheath, leather sheath, leather sheath making, leather sheath for knife, custom leather sheath, leather butterfly sheath, leather pouch sheath, paul long sheath, leather craft, leather knife sheath belt loop, making a leather sheath, sheath making, knife sheath, custom sheath, leather knife sheath tutorial, paul long, sheath tutorial, sheath, sheath making for knives

Id: MhVWVc_rdKA

Length: 18min 49sec (1129 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021