Hunter dressed in leather

L

Laredian

Joined
May 27, 2013
Messages
199
Hello,

I wanted to share with you a hunter I have made for my mothers birthday. She is an avid hunter so I hope she will like it.

The knife is made from 80CrV2. Flats on the blade are etched in ferric chloride and the blade has a 800grit hand rubbed satin. The knife is about 21cm long overall and the blade is about 10,5cm long.

The handle is poplar (or cottonwood not sure what the exact translation is) that was stabilized red with black liners and bronze pins. The prominent red handle I've chosen because one: it's my moms favorite color and second: if she drops it while hunting, she won't lose it that easily.

I am quite proud of the leather sheath. It's the second one I've ever made and it was quite a challenge, but I am really starting to love working with leather...it's great fun. I tried to give the front side a sort of basketweave ornament(dont know if that is the right word for it, correct me please if I'm wrong). It was punched in the leather while it was wet.

My pictures suck as always I apologise for that. I will try to make an upload better pictures soon.
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Please let me know what you think.

Also I need some advise regarding the leather sheath. I now only applied one coating of fiebings leather color, but as you can see on the pictures I have a couple of spots where the color did not adhere to the leather. And I am not sure what caused this. I tried to make sure there are no remnants of glue and the such on the sheath before I applied the color.
 
I sometimes apply up to three layers of dye.
There's a sheats section on this forum
Good looking knife ans sheath btw
 
You did an excellent job. I know your mom will be prod of it.

Before dying leather make sure to clean it well. Any place with glue or finger grease will not take the dye right. Putting the dye on two or three times can help even out the color.
 
Nice job both on the knife and the sheath. The correct term would be basket stamping, or basket tooling, which you did very well by the way. Those do look like glue spots to me. Second or third coat will even out the color but won't fix the glue spots. Fiebings makes a deglazer that some folks use to kinda strip their leather prior to dyeing. That can be done with acetone too but I don't use either. Just can't see that as being good for the leather. I do very little dyeing anymore. I've found over the years and with thousands of sheaths that a dyed sheath will have about half the lifespan of an undyed sheath. Most tanneries also make a drum dyed vegtable tan leather that can be used for a finished project that ya want in another color. It will stamp and tool the same (except for intricate flower carving), the color is even, the leather will last and you have no problems with color fastness or dye transfer. However it is expensive keeping a bunch of different colors of leather around. I'd trim those sharp point corners a hair, make em more of a 45 degree angle. You will find that eventually with a hard use sheath that those points will curl or deform. I talking about the two at the top of the sheath and the one at the bottom. That could still be done now without too much effort.

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See on these two sheaths no sharp corners, and where there were they have been, nipped and blended in.
 
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Thank you all for the kind words. I tried to clean the spots and then tried to apply the dye again and it worked ok, might need another coating.

Horsewright Horsewright : thank you for sharing your knowledge. I can see now the impracticality of the sharp corners on my sheath you mentioned compared to your sheaths. Also in your experience, what decreases the life span of a dyed sheath compared to a non dyed sheath and how does the material fail?
 
They dry out and crack. Once leather cracks there's no going back, its done. I've tried keeping em conditioned etc doesn't really seem to make all that much difference. A local guy that knows my aversion to dyeing sheaths brought me a bottle of single malt when he asked for a black sheath and not just a trade either. He wanted to pay for the sheath too. The whiskey was just to get me to dye the sheath.
 
Would applying wax on a dyed sheath help against it drying out and cracking? Or does that only work on leather that has not been dyed? Or did you reference that when you said you tried to keep them conditioned?
 
Yep will conditioning wax help, yes. But it won't stop it.
 
The cottonwood (poplar) looks great. I have cords of it stacked around my property, and am always putting aside interesting pieces with curl or spalting.
 
not visible and when I open them in a new tab, i get a security warning that that site is dangerous
 
Well I usually use vgy.me for imagehosting, but in the first post I used lensdump because I had issues uploading to vgy. I do not know what causes the warning, but I will try linking the images from the first post also from vgy.
 
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