The Easiest Way to Wet Mold Leather EVER

hey everybody so exciting one this is our first video sponsored by buckle guy and we have quite the video for you today i'm super psyched on this so today we're going to show you how we make our fully lined fully stitched trays these things are so nice and we do that using buckle guys mold so buckle guy makes these two-part wet molds three-part really this is what i have going we're going to make the bigger version of this and you can see they're very tight fit but they are just awesome so this is wicked and craig i believe this is deer print leather we're going to be using some licking crack panels as well um i know this is we're not usually salesy but we're introducing you to bakuga if you've never heard of them they sell hides but they also sell panels so if you don't want to buy a full height of leather you can get a one square foot hide you get a two square foot hide they sell them in all different shapes so if you want to get a four inch wide hide that's eight inches long to make three wallet shells you can do that too we're going to be using two panels of wicket and craig and if kelly not pans up actually i got to hide my soda real quick though uh they we bought i bought all these this is not i love these these are so cool um they're great so i'm gonna show you a new one how i put it together and i'm gonna tell you all about what it's made out of because they use a special kind of plywood they have them cnc'd locally in massachusetts and then we're going to get to making one and show you how to do it all in this video so there's a bunch of different shapes of these they have circles and squares and hexagons this is one of their newer ones it's a pill shape but it doesn't come like this so this is the smaller version and this is the big version and the big version you can see is unopened because i wanted to show you how it comes just brand new because you have a lot of options now the first thing is uh we're doing a giveaway so we're giving away a set of the pill shaped wet molds the big one and the small one uh click first link in the description sign up for buckle guy's email list and you're entered that's all you got to do nothing fancy so let's get into setting this up so the way i set these up now though they're interesting right because i like this it seems counterintuitive at first you're like why don't they just come put together but it makes a lot of sense so this is the way they come they come with your outer mold your inner mold and then just a flat piece this is russian birch it's an untreated plywood that feels like it has like a coating on it but it doesn't and i can tell you from the molds i've had for months now it's a really nice material because it just doesn't work at all um the way i do it is that i'm gonna put this together by centering the inner mold and on the outer mold and then using my brad nailer to just put a couple of brads in but it comes like this so that you have options you can stack other wood under this to control how deep if you want to make if you can pull off i don't know if this is even possible but if you want to make a six inch deep wet molded tray you can stack leather under this and make it taller and then when you slide this piece down all the way it'll make a big tray that says tall if you can pull it off like i said i don't even know if that's possible the other thing it allows you to do is to put this directly on another surface and clamp it directly to your workbench so you have lots of options i like using a brad nailer on these because for me personally i just use some clamps as you'll see when we get going with this and um i i like them as is but you could use brad nailer you could put some screws in you could do whatever you want to make it however you want and you can stack them up to make bigger trays etc so all i do is i just have that kind of roughly centered and i'm just going to brad nail it straight to the thing so you don't have to go crazy with it these little i only use two nails in case i want to pop it off and adjust the mold but um you could use screws too that's probably smarter move but this won't show up in your mold at all and now it's ready to go it's ready to be used so for clamps i just use these dewalt clamps i use these because they have a rubber on them you can use like metal c clamps but it is wood so if you are trying to crank it down you'll you'll just dig right into the wood um with these you don't have that problem and i have like four i have i usually use four per but sometimes if for a bigger mold like this i've never done this particular shape before you might need six because you might need one on either side as well the other thing you can do is if you have a press you can just slide it right into the press press it down and it'll press it for you leave it there for maybe five minutes but yeah that's it they're super easy to use and this project believe it or not is really simple and they're super fun so we're gonna get into the wet molding part of it so to get the right size uh for the chunk of leather we're gonna put in this mold i basically just go by the size of the outside of the mold i just use it i found that it always usually gets me enough to trim now remember the way that we do it we're looking to have a little bit of a lip so if you wanted to bang these out with just like 10 ounce you know 8 to 10 ounce leather and cut them flush you could use a little bit less material than this but we want a lip that we can sew so i'm looking for to have a little extra so i just have cold water here you can use hot water you can use whatever um a tip don't try to carry a whole tray of this stuff across the room bring the tray use a watering can it's not just for b-roll it's because i've spilled trays of water before um buckle guy the cool thing that i just realized that buckle guy does when they have their panels done or when they have this so this is wicked and craig but it's split down to like this is like three ounces they actually have the backs of everything finished and i don't even realize that that's sick um so like normally and there's nothing wrong with it but like normally when you order um from a supplier that has wicked or something like that and you order a thin they'll split it down for you but then it's unfished and finished back apparently buckle guy um [Music] has their bags finished which is six so that means they're ordering all of this leather to weight and if you're not gonna be lining anything you're gonna have a nice finish back to work with all the time i'll confirm with them actually hold on a second so yeah they do i just called hugh from buckle guy and all of the backs are finished so they have they ordered everything split down and then finished that's a really really nice touch to be honest with you um we're new to working together we'll learn the whole catalog soon so what i'm doing is i waited till everything was saturated through which is not 20 or 30 minutes like it usually just takes five minutes i'm gonna let it drip drain a little bit i'm just gonna set that aside and i'm bringing in my mold here and this is the first step it's this whole project is super easy guys you're gonna like them i mean i i make them for fun all the time you can ask helena we have so many trees floating around this workshop with nothing to do with them um i have a dozen at least i just can't stop making them so the green is this the one that i want to be on the inside of the tray so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take that i'm going to flip it upside down and put it on my mold but we have our top part to do all the hard work you've seen me do the thing before where i nail everything down i've done that for years we don't have to do that here we're just going to put the green down what i do is i just kind of mold it just like that with my hands a little bit now i want this one to be on the bottom so i'm going to put that on top of the green and then we take our top part and this whole thing seems a little bit aggressive but i promise you the leather will be fine take your top part put your weight into it and then that's it we just clamp it down so it's kind of like if you've ever you know it's kind of like lug nuts when you're replacing a tire what i like to do is kind of go opposite corners just to get the tension of everything right because if you go once i mean you can go one side at a time you're not gonna mess it up but it's kind of easier to apply the clip when you put the clamps on so just kind of do like go with this one then do a little bit on this one then do a little bit on this one just kind of go in like a star pattern or whatever i've noticed it's just easier to get the leather evenly pressed in the mold itself and you can also see from the side that looks like we're pretty you don't want to overwork it and break your clamps because believe it or not these aren't the highest quality clamps they're pretty light use but they're perfect for leather work and they're ergonomical to use um and that's it so we are just gonna let this sit i usually let these sit overnight um just to make sure that they dry and that's pretty much all the hard work so we're gonna come back tomorrow and we'll show you how we do all of our finishing work we're going to crease the edges we're going to do a stitch line we're going to have a nice little lip and yeah we'll be back tomorrow all right new shirt new day it's kind of late in the day sometimes these take a little long these can take a while to dry if you leave them in the mold like for 24 hours straight so what i like to do i did this last night actually um but it was off camera what i'll do is after they've been in the mold for an hour or two i'll take off the top and i'll just it'll keep its shape like you can see how nicely that's formed and that way you'll really let like these parts dry because what can happen is the top will dry but by having the wood like sandwiched obviously there's no airflow just let it dry like this and then in the morning come back in put this on and you can clamp it in and really get that nice crisp edge while it's just barely damp so we are fully dry now um this next step this is kind of a three-day process the way i do it so this is our bottom this is our top you could see this is a little i went a little too lightweight so this is very thin leather like three ounces i would go like four ounces these these molds they have an eighth inch gap so you really can't go over 12 ounces but this i think is a little too light um because we did get a couple wrinkles here now that's fine you'll see once we make this then we're going to basically cut almost all of this away but uh three and three ounces when you're only using a five ounce bottom might be a little too light good thing is though now it's time to glue everything up and once we get everything glued up i like to let these sit overnight glued just because there's curves and stuff you don't have to but that's just how i liked it so if you do happen to pick some leather that's maybe a little too thin i'm just going to use some of the stiffener that we like to use this is a thin nylon this one has a sticky back and i just cut it out to fit in the bottom this might not even be necessary but i'm always you know better safe than sorry and this will just make sure that if we did pick a leather that's a little too thin it won't be super floppy once we have everything together which after we glue it and do all of our stuff i highly doubt that's actually going to be the case but next step is we have to do the glue up now what i like to do is i take the molds and i put my pieces on the molds right so we have the bottom is going to fit into this the top is going to fit over that and we're going to try the tolling tolling free barge for this one i've we usually just use the standard barge but i made these cute little containers of the new stuff so we're going to use this and all we do is just slather it on both sides i mean it's it's pretty much just like gluing up any other wallet or leather piece i tend to go kind of heavy if you're using a leather with a finished back you can either do two coats or you can do one kind of heavy coat this stuff smells like a hair salon so that's interesting and like i said before we don't need to glue all the way up to the edge because we're only keeping about an eighth to a quarter inch of this lip so that'll kind of prevent us from getting our mold covered in glue because we're never going to go near that edge okay so usually i read up about this honestly i've never this is the first time i've used this besides we did a sample and it seemed to work pretty well so um but this one apparently you don't you just wait five minutes but it has a four hour work time and it's never gonna be fully dry to the touch so we're gonna set a timer for five minutes and then we'll come back and just put it all together and then we're gonna wait until tomorrow to finish it up all right so we are it dries a little stickier than the normal barge but it smells really sweet like candy now so that's kind of cool um so this is how i do this i'm sure there are other ways to do it but i've made dozens of these at this point because i'm obsessed with them and this works well so this is our base i'm going to leave it on the mold this is the bottom so this is going to be the top of the tray when you're looking down at it this is the bottom i'm going to kind of roughly place it on here but you don't it is covered in glue so you got to be careful just want to make sure it's lined up and then we're gonna do this i just slam it down there it's like almond that's what it is it smells like almonds yeah interesting we'll see if it sticks give it a go i'm going to take my roller go around the outsides and this will make sure that this base is nice and stuck down because these corners here when you do the pop thing they don't stick down all the way sometimes so i take my roller i'm going to flatten that down and then what i like to do and again you can come up with any way to do this that you want i like to take the top and put it back on and then put it in the clamps and i'm going to actually leave this for like an hour too i'm sure you could get away with doing this for like five minutes but i like to be extra safe actually sure that this this stuff is like fully glued down so that it doesn't separate even though we're gonna stitch it you know you can never be too careful um obviously this would be a fairly difficult thing to put into like large production um if you're doing it this way but if you're just doing like single 10 ounce leather you could bang 100 of these out in a day probably because you don't need to leave them in the clamps as long as long as they get the shape they'll dry in the shape if you use a single piece of leather so we're going to tighten this down and we're losing light as you can see again so we're going to turn this into a 3d process i'm going to be better safe than sorry i'll leave this overnight to dry and we'll come back tomorrow and finish it up all right so day three our glue should be dry and remember this is not a three-day project it's just between dry times and our production style that just kind of worked out that way with filming but you can get these done the dry time on the leather takes 24 hours or so but the gluing part you can do in an hour but as you can see our glue is all set now so when we pull this out of the mold we're going to have one full tray and now it's time to do some trimming so the first step after this is all glued up and out of the tray is to get it trimmed up now if you're not going to stitch it or if you're going to stitch on the side you could just cut it so it's flat but i use a lip so that i have something to stitch i'm going to do a quarter inch a little over a quarter inch lip so i'm going to set my dividers to like about a quarter inch there a little bit over maybe 3 8 of an inch i'm gonna kind of butt it right up against this side here and i'm pushing kind of i'm only pushing down on this one i don't want this one to really dig into the leather much and just make a light mark it doesn't need to be really super deep this is just a rough guide for you to cut so the first thing i do is i take my ruler it depends on the shape um they have they make a bunch of different shapes this one has a couple of straight sides so i'm going to get those taken care of first be a little careful with this one holding the rulers a little tricky but i'm just going to do a few light passes you don't have to get it all in one go so we got that side and then we got this side and then of course on the curves there's really no other way to do it but to freehand so make sure you're ready to take on that task it's not hard it's a nice broad curve so this i think is my favorite part of this project because we just did our trim so now when we flip it over technically we're going to see like pretty much our finished tray because we used a nice strong glue so if you don't want to stitch this you can finish the edges and this is it so you're ready there we go nice two-tone tray fully lined no open grain just all beautiful leather but we're going to do a little bit more to it so we have to flip it over again actually i'm going to bring this over to the power sander you want to just sand it give everything a good little sanding and make sure that you clean up your cuts a little bit so let me go do that first you've seen that a million times then we'll get to the stitching and all that kind of stuff so once we have everything sanded down and the curve is nice what i'm going to do is to make it really easy i do this on all my trays i stitch from the back so i'm just going to use my dividers to mark my stitch line and then we're going to go over and punch our holes and it's a special day because uh this punch pad i've had for 12 years we've used we filmed every video with it and you can see it's like indented we've used it so much so we did pick up a new one this one's from japan buckle guy carries it um like i said we're not gonna be just randomly switching out our whole shop but it was time for that one to go so this is our new punch pad we're going to give it a little review i've only used one i've used it once yesterday we have two of them and i really liked it so all i'm going to do is i'm going to mark because of the curve now this depends on your shape i'm going to use my chisels to mark where the straight part starts on one side and on the other but only on one end then i'm gonna go through with my two prong and i'm gonna mark just one by one i'm gonna put one prong in the existing hole and mark the next hole i'm not punching all the way through yet but this is just to get the spacing perfect so this is called the cobbler's anvil and you put shoes on it or whatever but if you can find one of these like an antique store you find them for 20 30 bucks they're really good for projects like this because you have this right angle here actually if you watch beeto on youtube he's is a cobbler and you can see the many uses for it in shoes but it's actually great for just general leather use and all i'm going to do is i'm going to take my my hammer and i'm just going to knock down these stitches just to close up these holes if you would like to do any edge creasing the mold also serves as your holder basically so i'm just going to use our simple little jeep edge creaser i'm going to wet the outside of this and this is before i bevel i'm not good at edge creasing with this thing so doing it before i bevel kind of helps and then dampening the edge so i'm going to do a little dye on the edges before i burnish so dampening actually helps make the dye lay a little more even but i'm just going to go around and dampen this a little bit basically just case it and then make sure my edge creaser is set to the right distance i don't want it to be too far away from my stitch line while i have this in the mold i'm going to bevel the top edge then take it out of the mulch the last time and we'll bevel the underside um i'm gonna get a little fancy with it here i have some fibings uh light brown prodi and just a q-tip you can do the marker thing i've just never done it before i'd like to try it though buckle guy apparently sells markers so we gotta get one of those and give it a go um but what i'm gonna do is i have this sanded down to 400 grit and i'm just gonna kind of darken the edge just a tiny bit and then when we burnish it it'll darken a little bit more and i'm using a q-tip because i don't want to like get the dye if it gets on the green a little bit that's fine it's a dark enough color that it won't you won't see a hard line and it's basically the same color as this so you can go pretty easy or you can go pretty uh you don't have to be super rigid trying to get a good line because it's gonna look fine either way if you were to use like a dark brown or a black i would be a little bit more careful but that's why i usually pick when i'm dying edges like this i usually pick a color that's kind of close because to be honest with you i just don't have the steady hands to get a really nice crisp line with just a q-tip and die so we'll go around this a couple times i like to just make sure i get full penetration of the edge here because it'll you'll go back and see it soaking in and get a little get a little lighter and then once we're done with that i'll just give it a quick burnish and we'll be done and here we go so i threw some gum track on the edge burnish it up through some wax nice and shiny and i like doing this when you do the two tone because it gives it a nice edge where you you can't really see the two colors meeting and it makes it look really really professional so that's how we do our to our double our line trays um they feel almost it's weird to say but they feel almost fake when you hold them because you you know it's leather but like feels like it's wrapped around something it's hard to believe that it's wet molded because these these molds make them so precise but i'm obsessed if you follow us on instagram i got one of these molds like six months ago and i've made so many trays so um yeah so let's talk about let's come over here and talk about remember we are doing a giveaway so we're giving away the set we're doing a big one and a small one together this is what the small one looks like this is wicket and craig's burgundy leather this is wicked craig's olive leather and this is just their tan english bridle on the bottom but we're not giving away the trays themselves we're giving away with buckle guy a set of the molds so you're going to get the big one and the small one and we're trying to do make sure you guys know like all the colors and stuff that we're using because boko has such a large selection of stuff that we're going to be using a ton of different leathers like for example i didn't even know wick and craig this is a deer printed milled veg tan that wick and craig makes now i've been buying wicked greg leather since 2007 and i didn't even know this existed but it is so beautiful so we have a whole height of this we're going to be making a bag within a couple weeks this one i did a double i made a little bit of a wider lip and i did a double crease on it just to give it kind of like some interesting detail but i want to make sure that i start telling you guys exactly what we're using so for thread this is five millimeter spacing but what i wanted to show you was a comparison of thicknesses so this is the point six millimeter and this is the point eight millimeter ritza so you can see that this one's a little bit chunkier and this is they're both hammered down the same like i did to this one in the in the video that you that you just saw me do um but you can see that this one's a little thinner this one's a little chunkier um if you were to go up to the one millimeter it would be really chunky but it's nice it just lays it's a big thread so if that's looking going for it go for it um our colors this is colonial tan and this one is beige the colonial tan is more of like a would you say like a cinnamony tan caramel color maybe um i don't know how much i like up on camera this is just kind of a more traditional tan um so yeah i'm just i just want to make sure that we because we have all this big selection of different materials now that we're just being clear with you in case you want to pick up the same stuff the back is just their tan um yeah that's it so thank you guys so much for watching uh welcome buckle guide to the videos we're so happy to work with them um the response in the last video was just amazing you guys are already buckle guy customers we had no idea so yeah this is gonna be it's gonna be a cool ride so remember click the first link in the description to enter the giveaway we're going to announce the winner in next week's video and thank you guys so much for watching we'll see you next one you

Channel: Corter Leather

Views: 230,071

Keywords: The Easiest Way to Wet Mold Leather EVER, corter leather, corter tutorial, wet mold leather tutorial, leather wet mold, by hand, leather craft, leather work, leathercraft tutorial, leather craft tutorials, leather valet tray, leather valet tray pattern, leather tray tutorial, leather valet tray diy, leather dice tray diy, barge cement, ritza tiger thread

Id: v4tH2HAYu1w

Length: 26min 20sec (1580 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 04 2022