Working with the slightly thicker leather (3.5 to 4mm), has been really good, and I like the little bit of extra stiffness and weight the armour has.
However, it's made fitting lacing eyelets tricky as the eyelet stems are not long enough to reach through the thickness of the leather for crimping on the other side. My first thought was get eyelets with longer posts but my wholesaler says there are none available.
The trick is to compress the leather with a ball-peen hammer - put the round end of the hammer onto the leather, and hit it with another hammer.
It just goes to show, you really can solve some problems by hitting things. I'm so pleased!
1 Comment
5/18/2012 01:01:20 am
Can I make a point of health and safety here. (Oh god, I here everyone cry). While what you describe gets around the problem, there is a reasonably high chance that, as you are hitting one piece of hardened steel with another, slivers of metal may break off of one (or both) hammer heads and could fly into the eye of the beholder.
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AuthorDave Gullen, leather craftsman, writer, and grower of tree ferns. Archives
November 2008
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