One of the simple pleasures of leatherwork is that it can involve quite a lot of hitting things with hammers. Rivets, hole punches, eyelets, press studs and sometimes the leather (see 'A New Trick' below) all need the loving attention of what my father-in-law used to call the Manchester Spanner.
Most of the tools to close eyelets, rivets and press studs come with little coin-sized anvils to put under the item. They are usually flat on one side and concave on the other, the concave side used to preserve the shape of the domed top of a press stud for example. However, they can be a little small and fiddly, and although useful for putting inside things like scabbards and tubes I prefer to use a larger anvil plate.
The anvil plate I use is simply a thick plate of metal about 4" square. Using it means I don't have to keep lining up the rivet with the little round anvils, so it is faster, and also avoids another problem with the smaller anvils in that they can easily move. The rivet head then ends up on the edge of the anvil and you put a crease across the rivet head, mark the leather, or both.
There are a few tricks to using a hammer:
General: Two or three solid, controlled blows are better than a dozen light ones. If you don't hit rivets and studs hard enough they will never close and you can be there all day.
- Rivets: When the rivet is fully closed the sound the hammer makes changes from a 'bright' noise to a 'flat' one.
- Hole Punches: Again, solid, controlled blows. Too soft a blow will only partly cut the leather and compress the rest, making it even harder to punch through.
- Eyelets: I used to used a pair of eyelet pliers but have recently returned to using a hammer and the special eyelet anvil. The hammer/anvil closes the eyelet in a much neater way.
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