Charlie's Shed - a leather tool holster

 As some of you know I volunteer on the North Norfolk Railway as a steam fireman, trainee DMU driver and trainee guard. Some of these roles need a few bits of equipment which can be bought or made. 

Some of you also know that I have a 1930 Ariel Model A which needs two toolboxes and that I have a hankering to make these myself from leather, so I've concocted a few little jobs to learn about the leather work. 

This latest one is a little holster for a ticket clipper - that old-school tool that you used to see bus conductors and railway ticket collectors using to make holes in your ticket.

We start with a bit of 2 mm leather, soaked in the sink. Add to that the ticket clipper wrapped in cling film and a wooden form cut to the shape of the clipper plus a few millimetres.

Using the clipper and that form we can squash the wet leather around the clipper until it dries and miraculously it will have formed the shape of the clipper. Behind that there is a thicker bit of leather which will make the backing and the belt loop so that I can carry this around up and down the train.

When I've cut the backing to shape I can use my stitching punches to make the holes for the stitches. This is quite hard work on the thumbs! Since I made my key wallet a few weeks ago I have learnt to stitch in a box shape in order to make the belt loops rigid.

The next step is to glue and stitch the formed shape to the backing. We will be gluing flesh side to skin side, which will never work unless we use some sandpaper to rough up the skin side. We are going to stitch this joint as well but the stitching will go more easily if we glue it first.

We use the stitching pony to hold the work firmly whilst we sit in front of a YouTube video and sew it together using the normal saddle stitch.

The final step is to use the knife to cut the waste away.

There's always a question about belt loops but this time the design fits nicely against my waist and is easy to use. I can get the clipper in and out and the holster doesn't move at all.

Charlie's Shed - a leather key wallet

 As a precursor to making the tool boxes for the Model A, I'm doing a few leather work jobs in order to learn some new skills. This first one is a key wallet for a couple of keys that I carry when working on the railway. 

Here are the two keys in a cardboard mock-up of the wallet I'll be making:

The cardboard form is laid out on a sheet of 2.5 mm vegetable tanned leather. I've learned that vegetable tanned leather is stiff and makes good boxes and holsters, and that chrome tanned leather is softer and is used for clothes and gloves.

We'll cut the leather out with a craft knife. 

When the leather is wet, it's very easy to fold and form the shapes the wallet will need. This wallet has a double fold and additionally it needs a strip stitched to the back to form the belt loop. This means that the sequence of stitching is important because effectively the belt loop stitching becomes inaccessible once the front pocket is folded over and stitched but on the other hand, the belt loop covers up some of the front pocket stitching. 

What we have to do, is stitch part of the belt loop, then the pocket, then finish the belt loop.

Here's the belt loop in place. It's stitched at the bottom, where you can see it, but it's also got two rows of stitching behind the loop one of which was stitched before the front pocket and one after.

Here's the front pocket. The leather was formed around that T-shaped key and left flat for the smaller brass key. I stitched the T-shaped key pocket first though I had already fitted the press stud.

Long after I had finished this wallet I got some Tokenole leather buffing compound which I used with a wooden buffer to finish the edges.

Sewing Awl

 It’s amazing what you can do with a few bits of junk lying around the workshop. A leatherwork project (shortening a belt) revealed that sewing leather is not as easy as it looks - even when you have made the holes with your awl, you still need to re-open them as you make each stitch, and I didn’t have a sharp awl.

I had a long, sharp needle of about 2 mm, and went in search of a file handle - all of which had file-tang size holes in them, when the little wood lathe caught my eye. I sliced a bit of scrap oak on the bandsaw to make a 1” square blank, and attacked it with chisels:

I turned the end to 13 mm OD, to fit snugly inside a bit of 15 mm copper tube; I annealed the tube and formed the end over so that I had a neat ferrule, and glued it on the handle with some Loctite, pushing the needle into a 1.5 mm hole in the end.

Took about an hour:

Skiving Knife

As you know I have a diverse range of interests, though they are often linked in some way. When the Model A finally finds a space on the bench, it's going to need a seat cover and two leather 'front's' for the toolboxes, so I have a hankering to learn about leather working. I've also made one or two knives...

Leatherworking is one of many hobbies for which you can buy a huge range of tools with an equally huge range of qualities. I'm a beginner, unwilling to invest in something I may be no good at, and unsure of what tools are really useful. My wife bought a few old leatherworking awls, which I cleaned and sharpened, with a view to trimming an over-long belt that I have had for years, from the buckle end..

Remanufacturing the belt with the buckle in a different place involved slimming down the end of the belt to reduce the thickness of the leather - a process known as skiving.

Skiving is used in leatherwork especially in areas that are to be bent or folded and which must be pliable without becoming weakened. You really need a wide bladed knife for skiving; there are plenty of cheap ones available on eBay but of course you get what you pay for and they are unlikely to be made of decent steel. As you know I've made a few knives and it was a simple matter to make one of my own from a piece of 40 mm wide 1095 knife steel.

As usual I drew out the pattern on a piece of paper stuck to the steel. This is 3 mm thick flat bar to provide a stiff and heavy knife. The profile was cut out with the hacksaw and filed to shape. 

I cut the primary bevel on the linisher before heating the blade area cherry red in the furnace and the quenching in oil.

Whilst the blade has yet to be tempered it takes an edge very well and it's perfectly suited to the job it was designed for. 

Tools again - New washer for the FH tyre inflator

Some of you might have seen my post on Thapex tyre pumps - click here. As you might expect, pumps bought from eBay, autojumbles and car boot sales arrive in unpredictable condition, cracked, missing or tired washers and almost invariably without their connectors.

Some while back, I bought a nice new washer purporting to fit one of my pumps and it sat on my desk for a number of years until I came to fit it - which of course it didn't. It's about 1 mm too small.

So, time to roll out a lost art shown to me by my grandfather Leslie, who was a serious cyclist - he worked at the docks during the war, and having relocated from West Ham to Ewell had a 18 mile commute to work, which he did twice each day on his bicycle. What you do is this:

Start with a piece of leather, in my case the cuff from an old Jalatte safety boot. For a 7/8" pump, you will want a disc of about 30 mm diameter which you can cut with scissors, or however you want.

Next, punch a hole in the middle. The washer screw in a Thapex pump is 2BA, so a 5 mm punch will do. Next, we are going to form the leather into a cup; before we do that we are going to reduce the thickness of the leather around the edge, a process called 'skiving'. You use a very sharp - no, very, very sharp knife to slice a layer off the surface, reducing the thickness at the edge to perhaps half what it was (the boot was about 2.4 mm thick).

Fix the retaining washer in place with the screw and add a second washer on the back - I used an M5 repair washer on the back and an M8 washer under the screw head, to support the flat part of the washer at the right diameter - all clamped tight with a 2BA nut. Drop the whole lot in a cup of water for a few hours until it is soaked through.

This is a 22mm Jubilee clip - the inside diameter is set to match the inside diameter of the pump. I have pushed the wet washer into the clip to form the cupped shape. Make sure it is square and leave it to dry out.

And that's it - next day, we have one perfect cup washer. I smear the washer in neat's foot oil and assemble it straight away, before it has a chance to return to it's original shape.

Here it is installed: