Leather Wet Molds: DIY or BUY? Pt. 1: DIY

hey everybody um so we're going to have a two-part video let me address the mic a little bit coming up where we explore whether it's worth it or if you can make your own wet molds in the style that Buckle guy kind of popularized um because we do get the comments sometimes that these are a little bit expensive and I agree but I think once you see how making your own wet molds goes uh you'll find the value in these however there might be a shape that you can't find and want to make it yourself so we are going to wake make our own Buckle guy style wet mold um the big difference being this is made out of very thick Marine ply which is water resistant and we're going to just be using regular plywood and then we'll put a coat of shellac on it if we like the shape and we won't if we don't so the first way that we used to do wet molding is we would make a mold like this and then we would put some leather on it while it was wet and we would stick it down and tape it and or tack it or whatever so we got the shape we'd use Sharpies you can go back on the channel done it tons of times then um Buckle guy kind of popularized the style of having a Topper where you just push this down clamp it and it does all the work for you and makes really smooth molds which you can see with this one so this is obviously the first time I made it I made my own wet mold in preparation for this video to see if it would work um you can see that even though this is going to be cut off super clean lines all done at home with basic hand tools now I do want to make a disclaimer here you're going to need some tools that can kick back can do dangerous stuff so if you don't have woodworking experience um be very very careful or have someone else do this for you or buy the bike the buckling molds because we're going to be using jigsaw we're going to be using a hand router um those are all things that are like if you're not used to using them they can kick back and do all sorts of bad stuff to your hands and you want to protect your hands so we went from just simply wet molding around Pockets which works to having our frame set up which works even better now the question is it's a two-part question can you make your own and how easy is it to make your own wet mold in this style can you get it to work and is it cost effective versus buying not even just Buckle guy plenty of people make them now a pre-built mold that will do what you wanted to do because you have to factor in your time making the mold Etc so what I've done is I have designed a vertical sort of peasant style shape and we're going to make wet mold out of this and then we're going to make a bag out of it in the second video so these are going to be my templates um it's just two printouts of the same shape but as you can see one is about I believe it's about eight millimeters it's one centimeter bigger than the other shape now the inner shape is going to be our inner mold and the outer shape is going to be the outer sheath so that we have room in here for our leather now I'm pretty sure that if you were to do this on CNC you would do a much smaller tolerance but since we're shaping this with hand tools I want to give myself a little extra room um just because I like to use thicker leather on these eight nine ounce leather and this will allow us to get a nice crisp Edge to stitch without the sides of our outer sleeve pressing down and if I have any little Jagged inconsistencies they'll scratch the leather this way um it'll keep everything held down tight it might be a little bit uh Loose as far as the fitment goes but with the Stitch line from what I found it's better to err on the side of going a little bit bigger and the Stitch lines really all I care about because the mold will be taller than the top piece so the top piece isn't going to be touching the mold at all so the first thing I'm doing is I'm cutting out one of the shapes in the big size and then I'll cut the other someone out in the small size so the first thing we need to do because we're going to be using a um a trim router bit when the way that this works is this is a guide bearing and this will ride along the template we're going to make and anything we glue on top of it it will cut to the exact shape so the first thing we need to do is make our template out of quarter inch plywood and we want to make sure that this is really really close to the shape that we want now the thing that I've learned in prep in trying this a couple times to make this video is that little tiny uh variations in shape never really like you think it's going to be totally exact they're never going to come out in the leather so if you have a little Bobble or anything don't really worry about it um the leather kind of absorbs those mishaps and I'm going to put this on one side because I'm cutting inside um which we're in the workshop I would normally do this like outside or somewhere else but we have our lighting set up in here and it's really not that much um of a mat it'll be a little bit of a mess so don't worry usually do this outside this is not the normal practice let me move my closer so the first thing we need to do we want this positive so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my jigsaw with I switched out the normal wood blade for a fine tooth blade because this is very thin and we want to cut a little outside of this black glove Sharpie line then we're going to sand right up to it so that we know that our pattern is perfect foreign [Music] anything just a simple 99 jigsaw it's really easy with the quarter inch ply to get a nice um close cut even without sanding just make sure I was always afraid to switch my blade out because I was like I don't know how to switch my blade out usually on most of them you just turn it and you want a nice fine tooth um blade that's going to make making your cut and making your and sanding down much easier so go out and buy a pack of uh jigsaw blades that aren't super chunky we are going to actually switch out for this probably when we get to the thicker material because what we're going to do is instead of using uh the thickness of ply that we want our bag to be we're going to use multiple pieces of 3 8 I believe or half inch ply we're going to stack a couple of those up um a because that's what I have but B because it's going to make it's just going to make our job easier um because we're just using hand tools if you're using a CNC router if you have a wood shop again feel free to use one inch ply if you want a one inch thick and you only want to do this once but we're going to have to use do things a couple times because we're only using these hand tools that we have because I don't have a wood shop so I'm going to go sand this down really quick to this line you can see how I left the Sharpie line here I'm going to sand up to the line and then I'll come I'm going to come back and show you guys how we're going to put our router bit in and make our essentially copies of this that we're going to turn into our mold the top part of our molds all right so this is a flush trim bit and there's two types of flush trim bits so this is a bearing and this is basically the bearing is going to ride on the template and the trim bit is going to cut whatever's under it or whatever's over it on top to be the same shape as our guide now there's two types of these you get it with a bearing on the on the bottom and the bearing on the top I have one with the bearing on the bottom because I used it to trim out um linoleum countertops we're going to make it work with this this basically just means that we're going to tape we'd use some double stick tape you can use like not the crazy hot glue like just regular hot glue you can use that as well um but for us we have plenty of double stick tape laying around so I'm just going to apply some here and here and then we'll peel that off and these are the dots these are the cool sticky dots that popular cells um and then I'm going to apply it right to the edge here like that should be enough to get us started but we shall see so the one thing that you want to be sure of is that you have your router set up properly to where the bearing is going to hit the template but the cutting blade is not the cutting blade is only going to cut the material that you wanted to cut because you can if you set it too low then you can be cutting directly into the template that you just made and that's not what we want so we're going to go over here I have my router set to the suggested speed and I'm going to move the microwave so it's not too loud and we're just going to Route this out [Music] um [Music] all right so we have our template here our three pieces and I'm just going to use more of this tape which will be linked below not a lot of it just to hold these together so we can get them stacked perfectly and then we'll just nail them to I don't think we even needed that top one but um once we get these stacked the right way we will put them on a base and that our bottom of our wet mold will just need to be roughly we're going to do a 3 16th round over and sand the edges just a tiny bit although we shouldn't need to if I can line this up correctly which is why I like using this tape because it gives you the opportunity to move things a little bit there we go that'll be our bottom and there we go so let me go cut a base out of half inch ply and we're looking really good and we'll just Brad nail everything basically directly to the half inch ply we want to make sure we don't get too big of a piece because we won't be able to fit our clamps on it okay so I cut two pieces of half inch ply the same size one's going to be the base to our wet mold so all those pieces that we just put together we're going to put about there I went and sanded this down a little bit and the important thing is you want to give yourself enough clamping room so that because especially if you're using half inches opposed to three quarter it's not as strong it'll bend a little bit you want ample clamping room and I'm just going to use some long brad nails two make sure that everything stays put and there is a good chance that I just nailed this directly into the well at least we know man they made it through looking pretty good I'm very happy with this but you can see how much work it is especially if you don't have the tools um so it's up to you whether you wanna it is really fun admittedly to make shapes that you just think about a shape and then you just make it but uh you do need some tools you do need some experience so right now I'm going to switch out our router bit to a 3 16 round over bit because we need to round over these sides because they are super sharp and they will do bad things to the leather if we leave them as they are [Music] and that's all it takes at the bottom of our mold is done if you want to you can sand down this little Ridge I never get my placement right on round over bits like that so I'll probably go through and just give this a light sanding we need to now turn our attention to our negative which is the piece that's going to slide over the top because that's kind of the scariest part to make and we are making it out of this piece of plywood that we cut out that is half inch to match our base and we are basically just going to drill a hole and cut right through because that's the only way I can think to do it without having a CNC or some sort of deep like plunge router which I don't have um so we're just going to make we're going to put the uh The Jig skill skills to the tasks The Jig saw skills to the test by just simply cutting that out the first time I did this I used a chunkier blade to in my jigsaw for this half inch cut and it was a pain in the butt this cut the quarter inch really well which obviously it's quarter inch but I'm gonna try it on the half inch and see if it gives me a cleaner cut and I'm going to be aiming for the inside of this line and then going in and hand sanding um but that's really all you can all I can do I don't have any other tools to make this easier for me again Buckeye cnc's them lots of people do different stuff with router tables and stuff this is the tools we have so it's the tools we're going to use all right [Music] and here we go so our negative fits pretty good you can see it's a pretty big tolerance but that's because I want to use a really thick leather the top isn't that great but remember I'm cutting the top off so it's going to be because it's going to be a bag so I'm going to do is I'm going to take some sandpaper I'm just going to hand sand that little tiny ledge that the round over bit left us because it's really more of an optical illusion because it's plywood than it is an actual ledge itself if you want to go crazy with this you can take some Bondo or body like auto body filler and do the sides but I'm telling you right now unless you're wet molding like super thin leather like two three ounce three four ounce it really does not matter um the leather is not going to pick up the grain structure or anything like that unless you really want it to and take the steps to do so even this little Gap I'm not going to fill I'm just going to sand down and that is it for our base I would highly suggest not doing this inside next thing we have our negative so our negative fits uh all I'm going to do is break the edges with some sandpaper you can see where I've already sanded up to for a Sharpie line so it should get us exactly the shape that I want and I tend to err on the large side when it comes to the negative part um this being the negative that being the positive I guess or the male and female whatever um just so that I have room I like to make these out of really thick leather if you like using seven or eight ounce leather feel free to do so this is a centimeter Gap around the whole thing feel free to close that into like half a centimeter uh you know six millimeter something like that but you as you can see it is it's not difficult to get these results it just takes experience some tools and some time uh we're about an hour and a half into this build um so you have to decide what you know what what is worth more to you your time or your money or if the a shape is not available by a vendor or whatever can you do it yourself to get the shape like this shape no one sells this shape and I'm ex I'm seeing this as a little peasant like Acorn collecting pouch from a you know a um like a movie um a fantasy movie or something and I'm going to use a Torx thing and have a little handle and a strap and so no one sells the shape so I had to make it myself now we've proven that you can what we're going to do next is we are going to put this in the wet mold and next week we will build the actual bag itself but for now we're going to leave you with a little bit of cliffhanger with the leather nice and laid out flat the only thing is with the half inch instead of three quarter inch on the top it is a little flimsy so you want to make sure you have enough clamps that you can support not only the corners but the centers as well otherwise if you leave it this thin this plywood is going to kind of bend a little bit so because this is an inch and a half tall it's a little taller than regular molds we're going to want to leave a little bit of extra so what I like to do is kind of go around and almost start it the old-fashioned way by pushing down everything and making sure that we're going to have plenty of leather to make our shape and you should see it sticking out once we start putting in our mold here so that's where our clamps come in and then the rest of it is basically just like the Buckle guy mold sets where I'm going to go kind of like you're tightening lug nuts in a star pattern I'm going to do one side then I'm going to do the opposite side because and actually we might have a little too much leather if you run into this issue here and here where we have a little bit of buckling what we can do is now we know that this is going to be our Corner seam we can go through and we can not a lot but we want to be able to make sure that our clamps can fit in nicely and get us the good pressure that we need to make this a nice crisp wet mold so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go in and cut this leather now remember this is thick leather this is not four five ounce this is a nine possibly 10 ounce Wick and Craig so what comes with the custom nature of making your own wet mold is that you kind of kind of figure out all of these little measurements on your own so we're going to line that back up we're going to pop this on and we're going to install I think I have seven clamps here so we're going to distribute those evenly but we're going to install them on opposite sides so that we can kind of hone in on our clamping pressure very carefully and now what I will do is in about an hour I'm going to come back and I'm going to move these clamps once these wet molds have been in the mold for like an hour if you take them out really nothing's going to happen you're not going to lose your shape or anything this is such thick leather and this is such an intense mold that you don't have to worry about that but you can see now since I've have all of these on I'm going to go around and give them all an extra squeeze or two making sure that they're really tightened down well and there we go so that's what we're going to leave you for part one in part two we're going to make this a real bag um let me know what you think in the comments if you make your own white molds I've heard of people 3D printing wet molds and my whole thing with this project is is it worth it to buy a wet mold as opposed to making it and can you make a wet mold of the same qualities professional wet mold now obviously if you have a full Workshop of tools for wood yes you can but we're using you know 90 Home Depot tools and you do have to keep it in a good router bit is 25 30 bucks in the US and needed two of them so that those two are the price of wet mold so really we're just comparing and seeing here um I think I'm leaning towards if there's a shape that I want that is carried by a manufacturer I'd rather the CNC version but if it's a shape that I want to make custom like this I now know that I have the skill even with minimal tools to make it myself so we will see you thank you guys so much for watching and we'll see in the next one

Channel: Corter Leather

Views: 23,079

Keywords: Leather Wet Mold, Corter, Corter Leather, Making a leather wet mold, leather wet mold DIY, Buckleguy wet mold, make a wet mold, how to make leather wet mold, molding leather with water, leather bag, leather pouch, leahtercraft, leatherwork

Id: f6as06QYcI0

Length: 23min 43sec (1423 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 10 2023