Sharing a TOP SECRET Leather Craft Trick (and more!)

hey everybody so we've never done one of these before we're going to do a little tips and tricks video um it's admittedly going to be a very random selection of little or big things that i've kind of learned over the years that help me out in weather work and in the shop so we'll just get right into it our first tip is going to be a safety tip use a metal ruler with a cork backing pretty much always don't use plastic don't use anything um that can slip around so like if you have no if you have a metal ruler but there's no cork on the back it does this it's a torque back roller it's not going to move at all and the metal because then when you're cutting you're not going to this is plastic you can sort of dig into the ruler if you're pressing up against it with the metal it just glides right along tip number two um i've said i've said all these pretty much in other videos but this one always gets the most response in the comments you need three dots to make a straight line what i mean by that is say i want to make a two inch strip so i'm going to measure down two inches make a mark with my awl that's once and then i'm going to go over here and do it twice now if you were to just put your ruler with these two dots and make your cut there's a chance it might be totally even in two inches all all the way across but if one of these dots is off at all it's going to tip your ruler in one direction or the other you need a third dot and you can do four or five too but you need a third dot somewhere to prevent that from happening because you have more points of contact with your ruler and that will allow you to make sure that your line is straight so with our three dots now we can make our cut well if it goes all the way through here we can make our cut and we'll see on our cutting board that we are two inches all the way across which leads us to our third tip um again this is such a small tip but it makes a huge difference get a cutting board with a grid and use the grid so you don't have to worry about making right angles or get buying special measuring tools or anything if you have a steel ruler and a cutting board with a grid because as long as you have one straight line you can use the grid on the cutting board to make yourself a right angle and then you can also use it if you don't have a pattern to cut out your pieces so let's say we have two inches by four inches is usually what i use for card pockets that line is the four inch line i just line my ruler up with that angle i have the top of my pocket is even with this line right here when i cut it i know that that's a two inch by four inch piece of leather these tips you'll notice are about efficiency because efficiency in the workshop is pretty paramount if you're going to not necessarily save time but use your time efficiency efficiently to make orders make projects etc this tip is one of those tips if you're printing out a pattern don't print it out on white paper and then transfer it to cardboard just print it out on card stock we use i just go to staples depending on where you are in the world you'll get it from different places this is 110 pound cover stock and this fits right into a laser printer and it's plenty thick you just have to print it out cut it once and then you have your print your your pattern you don't need to print it out on regular paper transfer it to cardboard trace it again cut it out you know you're you're you don't have to do things twice you just print it out on this cut it out and you're good to go if you are making a pattern that you want to use like 10 to 15 or 100 times use like something like weaver's pattern plastic you can print it out i'll still print it out on this cardstock and get my use out of it but i'll make the pattern plastic version before i trace this onto leather at all and once you have your pattern cut out um when you go to trace it this stuff doesn't have a cork backing like a ruler does so you know it can be kind of slippery slippery um an easy solution to that take your mall boom done i use my mall as a pattern weight all the time mostly because you can kind of hold the handle and push down on it and it's kind of out of the way you don't have to worry about it you can get pattern weights and stuff too but for just using stuff around the shop mall works great for a pattern weight the next step is a skill based step learn to cut by hand now there are a lot of different ways to cut leather you can get a laser cutter you can get a cricut you can die cut we'll get into die cutting later but the first step is just to learn how to cut by hand and i've made videos about this before and you can see you can get to the point where you can just cut a straight line without a roller and the reason you're going to do this is because once you have the skill to cut things out by hand a it makes sampling really really fast um you don't have to program anything into a cut into a computer and then put that into a you know a laser cutter or whatever i'm not nothing against laser cutters but i've noticed we get a lot of comments about people saying should i get a laser cutter and don't they're fun they're good tools but like don't let it hold you back from starting and if you learn to cut by hand first you can see right here you get to the point where you just cut a nice curve in 10 seconds and you're good to go um a story about this when i was in i went to i have a fine art degree and i was in a painting class and one of the kids said well we were painting a figure and one of the kids said well i don't paint realistic i paint um impressionist or you know he he had his style and the teacher said that's great if you're doing it on purpose but you need to prove that you can paint classically you can paint realistic before you make the choice to paint in your style and i kind of view hand cutting leather the same way you need to make sure that you're getting these cutting tools as a choice and not because you're unable to do everything by hand so learn how to cut leather learn how to cut out shapes it'll make your life much easier and then when you do move to those other tools as you get further in your craft you'll be able to use them in better ways because you'll understand the mechanics behind shapes and cutting pad and all that kind of stuff next up don't use metal hammers on metal tools now when i was first getting started i did this this is what happens when you use a metal hammer on a metal tool you see how it gets mushroomed over and then eventually it'll crack these two have been used pretty much the exact same amount of times and you can see the difference eric got them all and then started using it on this one so you always want to use something um i like these with the i think this is darling the with the they're weighted but they have the plastic so that this plastic is going to take the damage and it's going gonna dent before the tool is gonna round over um of course there are different size malls this is these are both barry king malls this one i think is 16 this is much heavier than 16. i've had these for like 15 years i don't remember the exact weights of them i like using a smaller one for doing my stitching chisels and then i have this big guy for when you're trying to use an inch and a half belt-in punch you know etc you need the weight behind it because it isn't metal so it is a little takes a little more force and when you have a heavier maul you can let the weight of it and gravity kind of do more of the work so when you're you know if you have to round over 100 straps you're not killing your arm if you're not used to it but yeah so don't use metal hammers for anything you don't want to round over so you've mastered cutting by hand and then you get an order or project that comes in and you need to make 3000 of something are you gonna sit there and cut everything out by hand because you got really good at it probably not because that's not the most efficient use of time let's say this is our keychain shape here and this is what we make out of them but we just recently made a few thousand of these and we didn't cut these by hand what we did was we used a cutting die now shameless plug weaver makes has a custom dye shop and they will make any shape that you want they can put holes in it they can put stitching holes they can do anything you want um this is sort of again this is a tool that you use once you have the fundamentals down so for us this die was probably i think it was about 125 but it's going to save us 50 hours of cutting to make thousands of these so it's worth the investment how do you use these it's like a cookie cutter so this this side is sharpened and then our holes are here and what we do is we'll put our leather under our press put our die down put the press down and it cuts out the shape over and over and over and over again and die cutting is really really nice because it gets you that consistency every single time and if you use manual press there's no electricity there's no real setup you don't have to worry about venting the only thing is that you can't really make changes to the design once you've had the dye made but if you stick with basic shapes so say you get your basic pocket cut out but you have this straight right so maybe you can cut out all your pockets and then you can just cut selective curves so if you want to change the curve to your pocket you can do that by hand but the main part cutting the four sides you can just put down press put down press put down press and it saves so much time and so i wanted to end this video with um one tip that was more of a sort of one of my secrets to how i do some stuff right so we've explained the die cutting and that can be for wallets or belts or bags or anything like that but one thing that's a little bit unique and some people do it for sure but it's not a very widely known um thing right how do you use your die cutting in combination with stamps to make things that are perfectly registered around right so this is like a sixteenth of an inch border and it's the same on all thousand of these that we made how did we do that well the key isn't all we're going to go to the press to show you but this is the stamp that we designed for it and as you can see not only do we have the graphics but what i do is i put a registration line in the stamp itself that is identical to the cutting die and let's show over to the press and show you how that works in practice so we're over at our 8-ton mighty wonder this is one of weaver's manual presses they also make a one ton version that's much smaller that's better for smaller spaces it's the first one i started out with and to use our stamps to do this whole thing you're really going to want some sort of press with a pretty good size press head it's not really you could probably make it work with a modified arbor press but these are much better for this task because you want very even pressure so i'm just gonna grab a piece of scrap here to show you um this is like a five ounce veg tan and then i'm gonna case it so just dampen it a bit there's a bunch of leather on it okay so the important thing is you want to test out your press first with your stamps because every stamp is going to require different pressure i'm going to put my stamp down swing my head over there we go now we have our stamp right and just to show you how quick it is to repeat this let's do another one [Music] and we're good to go i don't think we can fit the last one on here let's see you know what let's give it a go let's see if we can get three [Music] perfect okay so that's step one the second step in this process instead of punching out the keychain first making a jig lining up our stamp with it in the jig and then pressing the stamp into the finished cut out keychain i think that's the right way that it's usually done we've gone ahead and we've punched out the graphic first the thing that i've done is i've included the outline of the keychain into the stamp itself so when we go with get our custom cutting die all we have to do is just drop that in and it centers itself it does everything we need it to do we swing over our press head and there we go perfectly centered all the way around and the crazy thing about this is it was a little too much pressure so we need to adjust that that's how easy it is to do it's like it saves you so much time it's out of [Music] control and so here we go so this is why i say learn the fundamentals first but then don't be afraid to use tools to help you progress in what you can do and how fast you can do it because something like this i mean that you just watched me make three of these in about one minute right so put doing a thousand is less than a day's project if you were to do this all by hand to get a job like this you would have to charge a bunch of money um and the quality wouldn't necessarily be better because you're just going to be cutting things out by hand instead of die cutting them you're going to be stamping them one at a time lining everything up with jigs and stuff instead of having the registration in the stamp and just being able to go boom boom boom boom boom this allows you to be a little bit more competitive and it saves you a lot of time creating very easily easy rep repetitive repeatable repeatable steps to get a really good consistent quality so those are our little tips and tricks for our first uh video like this i can't believe we've never done one before if you want us to talk about any other areas of leather crafts and what we do maybe in special ways or how we've developed different things just uh leave it in the comments we're happy to share um as a two-person leather shop we've had to learn how to become very efficient to stay competitive and stay in business and it's one of our favorite things to do is streamline our processes and so until then thank you guys so much for watching and we'll see you next one you

Channel: Corter Leather

Views: 199,368

Rating: 4.9270587 out of 5

Keywords: TOP SECRET Leather Craft Trick, corter leather, corter, leather crafting tips and tricks, leather cutting dies, leather embossing, custom leather stamps, leather stamps, leather keychains, leather techniques, leather craft lessons, leather lessons, leather crafting tips, leather die cutting machine, leather press stamp, leather press machine

Id: hl8UAaQpC8k

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021