Leather Sheath Making - What I've Learned...

hey guys welcome back to the shop over the last month i have taken a deep dive into making leather cheese and researching a topic and today we're going to go over what i have learned thus far i will be standing on the shoulders of giants including the art of craftsmanship uh dave from horseride clothing jason from diomedes industries and a plethora of individuals across blade forms if you see anything in this video that i could do better please let me know in the comment section below since i am still learning the craft of leatherwork so with all that said let's get going for our leather sheath we are going to need to make a template now making these templates for the first time can be fairly intimidating and i actually have made multiple sheaves for the same knife just trying to dial in at my original template however this method here of wrapping a piece of scrap around your knife at the thickest part and measuring how much leather it takes to wrap around your knife i found to be a workable solution in this case when laid flat my template at the handle's thickest part will be four three quarters of an inch once you have this measurement you can cut it in half and measure off from your center line you can then shape the top of the sheath however you like and also the curvature of the sheath in my case i will be making a very square sheath that is called a tracker or a bushcraft type sheath once you have your template laid out fold it in half and trace it onto the other side i'd like to note that my welt on this sheath is going to be around one half of an inch wide it is also worth noting that on the final iteration of this template i knocked an eighth of an inch off the total width and i changed the belt loop to 1 8 wide once i had the template the way that i liked it i put it in cad printed it out and taped it to a nice firm piece of backing board the leather that we will be using for the sheaths today is a 7 to 8 ounce wicked and craig back skirting it is pre-dyed in brown and it is the best quality leather that i have ever worked with and that is not saying too much but i have worked with the imported leather and that stuff is a pain to work with so save yourself some frustration and go out and buy some good leather whether it's from wicked and craig or your local tandy make sure you don't use bad leather cutting out your template is a step that i used to rush and now i take a good deal of time trying to make sure that i get the template cut out nice and clean a good 90 degree cut will save you a bunch of time in the following steps once i get the template cut out and the welt cut out i draw the welt onto the inside of the template so i'll know where to glue up to notice that on the outside of my welt i left a little bit of extra material this will be cut away once the sheath is folded we'll now be finishing the edges on the top of the sheath and if any of you leather pros out there have some good recommendations of a more efficient process to finish the top of the sheath please let me know because this took me a while i started sanding with 600 grit sandpaper and then moved up to 1000 grit trying to get all the fuzzies gone i then took a number two beveler from tandy and beveled my edges after doing this on the rough side i realized that i should have done this first because i had to go back and sand again so if anyone has some good recommendations for prepping your edges for burnishing please let me know below i reapplied some elbow grease and thousand grit paper and then we're gonna move on to burnishing with some quick slick i recently purchased these dremel attachments for burnishing and so far i've been pleased with their performance versus using the hand tools for both your convenience and the channel's benefit i will put links below for all of the leather working items used in this build some of those will be affiliate links and some of them will not be once we have the top edge of our sheath burnished we will put down some quick slick onto the entrance of our sheet and the belt loop in order to burnish both of these locations i will be using a hand burnisher and blazing fast speed for this process this is nice because it lays down a lot of those fuzzies and it gives your final product a little bit more refinement and then wet the center of the sheath and the belt loops so i can fold it over and mark out where my belt loop will be contacting the back of the sheath once i have these marked out and roughed up i'll apply some contact cement and then i will place the belt loop in its final resting place i then use my stitch groover from tandy and put in where my stitches will be on the belt loop in hindsight it would have been easier to do this before gluing it onto the back of the sheath when i first started my leather working journey i bought a cheap set that happened to have some pricking irons in it i will be using these pricking irons to mark out where my holes will be in the belt loop these just provide a nice consistent spacing for me to target once we have our targets i will use a finishing nail chucked up in the drill press to puncture the belt loop and the body of the sheath i will be running a saddle stitch through these holes and in order to do so you need a piece of thread with needles on both ends to affix those needles you can run it through the eye of the needle then puncture the thread and pull it over the end in order to get a nice knot so it does not come undone in order to measure out how much thread i need i normally measure the distance that i will be threading and multiply it by 8 to 8.5 this normally gives me a little bit of extra but i'd rather have too much than too little using a saddle stitch we work our way all the way around this square and then i actually back stitch across the top of the square i have heard via my research that squares are not the best shape for your belt loop so take that into consideration when making your sheaths circles or arcs are thought to be more robust on a belt loop stitch after i run some backstitching across the top i'll make sure that both of my needles come out of the back of the sheath and then use a soldering iron to melt them down to the surface of the sheath i recently had made a leather stamp from gray ghost graphics i'm very happy with the performance of this stamp and you will note that i use it with an arbor press for a nice flat press and a crisp mark it's worth noting that on this sheath i actually offset it too far to the left and it wasn't as inline as i would like it to be this will be more apparent towards the end of the build and it is something that i will look out for in the future we are now going to prepare the welt to be glued into the sheath to do this i will thin out the welt towards the center of the fold this will make the fold just a little bit cleaner and we will also shorten the welt towards the center of the fold so that the leather can fold around it and not be twisted or kinked we'll then rough up both sides of the welt and apply some contact cement onto both sides and get it into the sheath it's worth mentioning here that i normally remove some material from the crease along where your blade will sit in the sheath this allows it to fold more easily and by getting this material out of the way i think that the aesthetics are your final fold will be better make sure to take great care when folding your sheath to line up all of your edges because once they contact each other with the contact cement they will want to stay stuck i then cut away the excess on the edge of the sheath and then take it to the belt sander to sand everything nice and flat i'm using a 220 grit belt on the sander and i think i probably can go higher after i get it sanded flush i'll use some 600 grit sandpaper and then some 1000 grit sandpaper to get the edge all nice and smooth i'll then hit it with the number two edge beveler and then sand it a little bit more after the edges are sanded to our liking we will be using the stitch groover to set our stitch line along the sheath with a half inch welt i have a bunch of real estate to lay down some stitches so i am going to be not only stitching one line all the way up but half to maybe a third of the way down i'll stitch a double line i think this looks cool and that's why i did it once again the pricking irons will come out of the leather crafting box and we will set where we drill our holes i use the single and double pricking irons for the curves in order to have a nice square penetration of our sheath i use some scrap pieces of leather under the sheath to compensate for the width of the belt loop i have this finishing nail spinning at around 2500 rpms and it easily pushes the material out of its path when going through this sheath however unlike a drill bit it does not remove material in order to have our stitches set flat on the back we use the stitch grouper again to connect the dots on the back end of the sheath i actually overshot one of those dots and wasn't too happy about that so i will need to increase my skills with some of these hand tools in the future now we're going to start in the middle there run a saddle stitch all the way up to the top and then all the way back down the side of the sheath so for those looking to learn a saddle stitch this next shot is a close-up you start off by inserting a needle with your right hand into the hole then you make a cross with the left needle coming under the right push through the same hole and then loop over the tip of that needle pull through make sure you get these pulled nice and tight and then repeat all the way down the sheath when inserting the left-handed needle into the hole with thread that's already there i make sure to pull that thread to one side of the hole and try to keep the needle going straight in the hole so that you don't catch a thread on your way through this can be a frustration if you catch a bunch of threads during your stitch and it will slow you down greatly so using this technique we spend some time here and get the entire sheath nice and stitched up it's worth mentioning here that if you're going to be making leather sheaths go ahead and invest in some nice saddlers needles these things will make your life way easier now that we have it all backstitched i will use the soldering iron again to burn off the very tips of the stitches that i cut and then i will hammer my stitches flat now we will do our final burnishing with a little quick slick and the largest burnisher in the kit so now we have a nice and smooth burnished edge you know i've been thinking about using some edge coat in the future so if anyone has some opinions on that or in reality any finishes that they like to put on their leather please comment below because i'm trying to learn here and i want to see how everyone else finishes their leather products because that's kind of a personalized feature of leather work and there's a lot of opinions out there so i'm going to be doing a little wet forming on this knife first thing i'll do is i'll spray the knife down with a little bit of ballistol and then i'll wrap it in some cling wrap one thing i like to do is put a little bit of duct tape towards the tip i've had knives just cut straight through this cling wrap and that's not fun so i put a little duct tape around the tip of the knife i pour just a little bit of water in the sheath real fast insert the knife into the sheath and then use my fingers to squeeze around the knife i will use this finger squeeze method for about five to ten minutes make sure it's good and formed and then set these sheaves in front of a fan in my garage being that it is summertime in texas the ambient temperature in my garage is about 97 degrees fahrenheit so drying out these sheets does not take very much time at all so please keep in mind like i mentioned the beginning in this video that i am a leather working novice however these two sheaths rank as number one and number two on my list of best leather sheaths that i've made which is not a very long list but these two are at the top there are some slight differences between these two sheets and i will strive to continue making a better product as i move forward as always guys if y'all got something out of this please drop a comment down below and let me know also hit that like button down below and if you're new here please consider subscribing to the channel it'll really help us out until the next time i'll catch y'all on the flip side [Music] you

Channel: Red Beard Ops

Views: 23,268

Keywords: red beard ops, knifemaker, knifemaking, knife maker, knife making, leather work, leather working, leather sheath, how to make a leather sheath for a hunting knife, how to make a leather sheath, custom leather sheath, knife sheath, how to make a knife sheath, how to make a knife sheath out of leather, leather knife sheath, leather craft tools, making a leather sheath, leather sheath stitching, leather sheath making, leather sheath for knife, leather working tools, saddle stitch

Id: 31VfXN8N90I

Length: 14min 10sec (850 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020