I had a go at making a collar for an axe.
You can probably tell I'm not an experienced leather worker, and as it turns out, I'm not a leather worker at all !!
Its a simple enough job.
A collar protects an axe from overstrike. This is an inexpensive axe and its been used a bit. It needed sharpening and some sanding on the haft to remove some splinters.
So I had the axe in the shed and in the vice to start with.
Ages ago I'd acquired a wide leather belt which I thought would be ideal to use as a collar.
It seems I was wrong ... it wasn't leather at all, it was actually "PU Leather", which is a kind of sandwiched plastic material.
We'll I thought I may as well keep going and see what I can learn.
I learnt quite a bit about: pre-forming holes; paying more attention to cutting around three dimensional shapes; thread strengths; and saddle stitching.
It turned into a really good learning experience !
As you can see, the PU doesn't stitch very nicely. I tried a few different ways to make holes.
And on the back you can see where I trimmed the PU to get to top to close .... and didn't pay enough attention to swell (so the rest of the edges don't meet)
I'm going to leave it in place and see how it goes, I don't think it will do any harm.
I do have some proper leather and now I have a much better idea about how to do a better job with that !
You can probably tell I'm not an experienced leather worker, and as it turns out, I'm not a leather worker at all !!
Its a simple enough job.
A collar protects an axe from overstrike. This is an inexpensive axe and its been used a bit. It needed sharpening and some sanding on the haft to remove some splinters.
So I had the axe in the shed and in the vice to start with.
Ages ago I'd acquired a wide leather belt which I thought would be ideal to use as a collar.
It seems I was wrong ... it wasn't leather at all, it was actually "PU Leather", which is a kind of sandwiched plastic material.
We'll I thought I may as well keep going and see what I can learn.
I learnt quite a bit about: pre-forming holes; paying more attention to cutting around three dimensional shapes; thread strengths; and saddle stitching.
It turned into a really good learning experience !
As you can see, the PU doesn't stitch very nicely. I tried a few different ways to make holes.
And on the back you can see where I trimmed the PU to get to top to close .... and didn't pay enough attention to swell (so the rest of the edges don't meet)
I'm going to leave it in place and see how it goes, I don't think it will do any harm.
I do have some proper leather and now I have a much better idea about how to do a better job with that !