When, Why, and How to Skive Leather by Hand

hey everybody um today we're going to talk about skiving leather uh something we haven't really touched on yet but skiving leather is a little bit of a more advanced technique and i'm going to move all these skiving leather is basically thinning down specific parts of leather you can thin down the edges for your construction or you can thin out the middle for pockets and stuff that you don't need thickness in specific areas so i have a couple wallets here um to show you why you might want to skive down leather um if we look at this wallet that's a pretty thick edge now this is a sample wallet of a pattern that i'm working on and when i make wallets for the first time i don't scribe anything down so i can see where the thickness is and what layers i might want to take the thickness down if we look at this wallet this wallet only has about three ounces less of thickness than this wallet does just two inch uh ounce and a half lining pieces but you can see that it's almost half the thickness on the edge we can thin our edges down for a bunch of reasons the first is it's really nice detail you get a nice little sloped look to the edges of your piece the other reason is you get your stitching chisels through the edges a lot easier because this is thinned out another thing you can do is you can use it for detailing so on this piece if we look the edge here is super razor thin so you don't have a lot of you don't have a big step up but this is actually a three or four ounce piece of leather that's been skived all the way down and the last thing is uh structural stuff so this is the sheath on one of my skiving knives that i use and what i've done and i don't know if you can actually see this on camera but when i put my knife into this sheath right now it hits on the heel here so that it's never going to go in and cut my stitching but just in case it does i have a piece of leather in here that instead of just ending so that because i don't need it on the sides what i've done is i've skived it down and so it looks roughly the same thickness but in reality there's a stopper piece of leather in here now that's all due to skiving you don't you don't get that weird look um it just like slowly thins out instead of just stopping and you have a bump here so there are a bunch of reasons and there are a lot of other reasons to skive leather too um purpose of this video we're just going to go through how to skive leather in a couple different ways so as usual there are a ton of different tool options to get the job done we're going to focus on some hand tools today you can use a bell skyver which is a big machine they're expensive though so the hand tools are pretty rudimentary take a little bit more skill but they require less space and they're fairly inexpensive we have three japanese style skiving knives and two french edgers these are all from weaver these tools are great they stay really sharp they're affordable but like most knives you can go crazy you can get multiple hundreds of dollars on a single knife i really like these two options so before we use any of our knives or skiving tools i like to make sure that they're sharp so i'm just going to use some compound here on a scrap piece of edge tan and we're just gonna strop stroke i never know how to say that word um we're just gonna give these a quick polish so i put a little bit of compound and then we'll use this one and i'm just gonna polish it up and you can see um your compound you see this dark here that's you're just removing a little tiny burrs in the metal to make sure that you have a nice smooth surface because especially with skiving tools um you're basically you want these things to act like razors if you can imagine like you take a sticker off your car window and it still leaves residue behind you got to break out a razor blade and you kind of hit it at almost a parallel angle but just just an angle enough to remove that gunk that's what you're trying to do with leather so this stuff needs to be pretty sharp so i'm just holding this at you can kind of feel the angle you're gonna put it down like this and i go back and forth you can pull like this i'm sure there are a lot of purists and a lot of different people that think things should be done specific ways i always go back and forth like this and you'll kind of feel it start to really slick it's almost like burnishing you'll feel it get nice and smooth and once we're done with that we're going to bring in some leather so the type of skiving tool you're going to use is depending on the type of skivving you want to do generally in our work at least there's two real different types of skiving the first is we want to bevel an edge the flat knife is really good for that because you're always going to be working your way down so you're always going to be thinning something out more and more if you want to let's say you have a pocket here right and this is going to be your pocket top and this is going to be below the surface so you want the top of the pocket to be the full thickness of the leather because it provides structure with cards going in and out but you want everything below it to be thinned out to remove some bulk you're going to want to use something like a french edger because the french edger is going to allow you to remove the same amount of thickness of leather for extended periods whereas the flat knife you're always going to be working down down down down it's very difficult to sort of shave um even thicknesses for long stretches of leather so with the french edger it's fairly simple tool to use as long as you keep it sharp we're going to dig in a little bit and you're just gonna kind of work your way down like this and i'm not the best with these admittedly um but once you get going and you get the right pressure we're removing the same amount it's almost like we're splitting this leather down a little bit and so if we cut into the part that we just skived down and thinned out this is the full thickness of the leather and we can see here we've thinned that out by about half and it's the same throughout our whole piece with a little bit of work so now we're going to use our flat knife to skive down some edges and i use this method on we use this method pretty much on every custom wallet that we make um this is probably the most common type of skiving that you're going to do and this is the type of skiving where we're beveling down an edge sort of like this right we create this edge here and what we're doing is we're thinning out our edges so that we can get our stitching chisels through a little bit easier we're removing some bulk so that when our wallets are closed they have some nice thin edges now one thing first on safety you always want to make a sheath for these these things i've never cut myself in like 15 years really using any other tools these things if they're floating around your workbench without a sheath on them they're so sharp that you just end up touching them and cutting yourself so make sure you make yourself a little sheath for just out of some scrap leather for any uh flat knifes that you have floating around so first step again we're gonna stroke our blade these are really important to keep nice and polished and again you can stroke like this i just kind of go back and forth i'm sure you guys let me know in the comments if there's a reason not to do this but uh so far so good um this seems to work fine and what you're looking for here you're not really sharpening the blade itself you use wet stones for that um you're looking to polish the blade so if we look here this is a new knife and i haven't done any edge work on it you can see how it's very um it hasn't been stroked so it's it's not shined up at all whereas if we look at this knife you have a mirror finish on it and what that mirror finish is going to allow you to do because we're kind of shaving through this leather it's going to make it nice and smooth and it's going to go through much easier so we're going to use this knife today now i'm going to show you how to set up to get an edge a beveled edge with scribing by hand that looks almost identical to something like a bell skyver which is a machine done edge so to start i have two sets of calipers here one is set up for my stitch line so my stitch line is going to land right about there my second set of calipers is set up to be a little wider than my stitch line and i would never do this on the front of the leather but this is just to show you it's not quite the same distance right it's a little bit less but i'm going to use these calipers on the back of my leather that i'm skiving to mark my skive edge and what this is going to do is this is going to give me a nice clean line to line my blade up with so that i know that my skive starts before my stitch line and then ends after it so my stitch line is going to land in the middle my stitch isn't going and my stitching isn't going to go through a piece of leather that's too thin and i'm not going to be going through a full thickness of leather either so this is the point where there are a lot of different ways to do this some people will get a nice sharp blade and they'll go all the way down their line like this and they'll just work at it and they'll work at it and they'll work at it that's a great way to do it if it works for you the way that i do it is i dig in with let's see i'm right-handed so i dig in with the corner of my blade that's facing the middle of my body and i kind of work my way down so i'm going like this and then i move and i go like this and eventually we start working our way through this leather and as you can see having this line allows you to keep your skive super super even so it looks like it's almost machine done once you get the hang of it right now i'm going to bring in a sharpie to show you kind of how i'm doing things so the way that i'm skiving i'm not trying to go in an even amount every single time i'm going to try to use a sharpie here to show you so if you were to use your blade to just kind of dig in and take a little bit and then go back and take a little bit more you'd be taking off you'd be cutting sort of even layers every single time until you get through and there's nothing wrong with that the way that i'm showing you how to do it is we're gonna go if you can see where my cut is so my cut is about right here right now i'm going to take my blade and i'm going to put it about halfway where half has been cut a little bit and half has not been cut at all and i'm going to work down and cut on the diagonal so instead of going a little bit at a time like this what we're doing is we're cutting like this and we're taking off we're cutting all the way through down to the edge every time we go and i've just found that for me that's a lot easier to to control because you can kind of get into a rhythm there we go once we are done you can see we have our nicely beveled edge we're ready to glue this down and we will have our stitch line right in the middle of that skive now the main question well i can tell you how to do it but in practice how do you learn because this isn't something that you're just gonna watch someone do be told verbally how to do it and then just do it this of all skills in leathercraft for me at least personally has been the one skill that has just taken repetition over and over and over and over again because it's a lot of it's mostly about feel you have to know what angle to hold your blade at how to hold your blade depending on what type of blade you have how far down do you want to go a lot of people will flip their blade over and sharpen it so that the bevel faces down and we get that common a lot i've just always done it like this so i do it like this my knife is sharpened and polished so that it goes through this way it doesn't go through this way there's a lot of personalization in this skill people a lot of people do it a lot of different ways my best advice is you can see that i'm skiving on a granite block people will use glass too you do not want to skive into wood you don't want to skive into a cutting board because we're not cutting perpendicular we're cutting at a very extreme angle the minute that you get through if you're on a like a rubber cutting board you're going to go through and you're going to stick straight into the cutting board and it just doesn't work so that's the first thing you want a hard surface and you want to use that hard surface so that when you come through your blade is you're never digging straight in you're coming you're floating across the top like this right the next thing is just simply repetition to learn this skill you have to practice it a lot the first thing i would suggest is using sort of an oily hide and a lot of just get a bunch of scrap of an oily hide the oils in the hide will make your knife glide through a lot easier so you can initially learn that you just want to learn the pressure the movements the muscle memory that's the first thing you want to learn skive your edge and then when you're done just cut it off make yourself another line with your dividers and do it all over again so i have my clean cut edge i've made my line i'm just going to go and do it all over again i'm going to put my blade and slowly start to work right through the leather and while you're repeating this it'll teach you a lot of things it'll teach you the pressure that you need to use because you shouldn't be pressing hard okay you shouldn't be it shouldn't take a lot of muscle to do this but it is a lot about technique the way that you move your knife through the leather the angle the way that your grip is um i personally i like to hold i don't know if you can see this but i have a pretty shallow grip on the knife and then i use my pointer finger on the blade itself to sort of guide through with a slight little it's a lot of pushing through with my arm and a little tiny fanning motion with my wrist and you're going to learn all that what works for you because like i said there are a million different ways little tiny minuscule movements that everybody does differently to make this work for them so once you've mastered all these skills when do you use them i have this little um card pocket little tea pocket to to kind of give you an example but i do want to touch on layering so you're going to utilize your flat knife edges when you're making multiple layers layered pieces now as a personal tip i like to leave the outside layer and the inside layer full thickness and the reason i like to do that is because when you go through after you've sanded down your edges and you bevel them to sand them down and burnish them if you have a ultra ultra ultra thin layer of leather you've skipped it down to be paper thin which is what you can do with the inside layers it's a lot easier for that beveler to cut through and then you're going to see almost like a plywood look on your top you're going to have like a little bevel in so i like to actually leave my top layers on a bifold it would be the pockets themselves and then on my shell if i'm doing a lined shell what i'll do is i'll actually cut out the interior lining first i'll skive down those edges and then i'll glue it to my exterior leather so that my exterior is a full thickness throughout and that way i can go and burnish and bevel this down with my edge beveler get a nice burnish and i have that full thickness there i don't have to worry about if i sand through when i hit another layer because this is ultra ultra thin so what i personally like to do is i like to sandwich anything that's not the outer layer or the inner layer i'll try to thin out as much as possible so what does that look like in um in practice i'll show you on this little card holder so on a card holder for example this is just a tea pocket that you would layer other cards over right if we flip this over now this is pretty thin but say this wasn't say this was like three or four ounces what we could do is we could use our calipers to measure out how thick the exposed area was and we would lay that line down now we know that we're gonna have another card laying below this but everything under that we could use our french edger and this is like two ounces so i don't know if i can get a good line here but oh there we go we can use our french edger to thin out the rest of it because as long as we have enough to hold our card we don't need the full thickness and this will result in our finished wallet being a lot more thin now because we're removing an even amount the whole way our edges are still going to have some thickness to them and once we layer another piece of leather over that you're going to feel that bump so in combination with that we can take our flat knife and we can well i gotta readjust here we can give ourselves a line and then we can go in and we can thin out the bottom of our pockets to be almost paper thin see so if we use these two skiving methods in tandem we're able to remove a lot of bulk from our pockets now of course it's not necessary to make a functioning wallet right but let's show you the difference so let's say that this is my center pocket and this is going to be my bottom pocket if this was unscribed or in just a piece of leather that's about right if i were to put this here you can see you would be able to you can feel there that step down because you have about two ounces three ounces of thickness and once the wall is finished you're going to feel that now with the pocket that we just skived removed some thickness and then we beveled the edge down if i put this on top this is nice and smooth all the way down because we've created a gradual thinning out and then at the bottom we've made this almost paper thin so when this is all constructed you'll have a nice flat feeling pair set of pockets and when you put your card in where you have a lot of bulk taken up by leather here and that you can feel that bulk that you removed is going to be taken up by the actual card so once you have a loaded wallet if you have a wallet like this and you put your cards in now all these pockets have been skived down the wall at full is going to be a lot more slim than a wallet that you didn't do any skiving on and that's one of the big reasons that i like to use it because it creates you're able to keep strength where you need it but you're able to remove a lot of material so that your final project is a little more sleek and a lot more manageable in your pocket because a lot of the times when we're working with hand you know we're hand building leather wallets we're using a little bit of a thicker material than a machine zone piece and so by removing some of that bulk you're able to get your pieces down to a little bit more manageable size for i want to say the general public and i don't mean to be um insulting or anything like that there are plenty of people that love just huge saddle wallets but a lot of people are used to just they've always had sort of um wallets that are machine made and this allows you to kind of get a more uniform feel that people are used to and so that's a little intro to skiving um you can go much more in depth with it and we will in a new in another video down the road but if you haven't picked up any skiving tools it's a great extra skill to learn once you've got construction down it's a great way to add a little bit more detail to your work and to really make things feel a little bit more polished and sleek in the function department so again we have the weaver the japanese skiving knives i think they're called the japanese straight knives there's three sizes i use all three sizes i prefer the middle one for kind of all around work but the middle the middle size is fairly interchangeable with the large size the large size is really good if you're doing like a bag a rolled edge on a bag you cover a lot more distance a little bit quicker the small one is great for when you're doing little tea pockets if that's something that you want to do i use that one a lot for let me just grab if you're doing curved things like this this little one comes in really really handy because it's a lot easier to get these detailed curves with one of these and then remember your french edgers are for removing mostly just uniform bulk over large sections so thank you guys for watching so much and we'll see in the next one you

Channel: Corter Leather

Views: 237,875

Keywords: How to Skive Leather by Hand, corter leather, corter, skive leather, leather crafting, leather crafting skills, leather craft tutorials, leather crafting for beginners, leather craft tools, leather working, leather working projects, weaver leather, leatherwork, leathercraft, leather tutorial

Id: ZKwoGWddOro

Length: 24min 32sec (1472 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020