Friday, February 20, 2009

Belting It Out Again

My first two belts were so fun that I immediately had to start the next one. Besides, my kids line up quickly when there are cool goodies to be had, and there was my older daughter, jostling her way to the head of the line! My younger daughter had already made her own belt, so she was sated for the moment.

For the new one I found a chain pattern on a photo of a tile, and I adapted it to fit the 1.5-inch wide belt blank I was using. The first thing I did was dampen the leather and use the edge creaser to mark lines along the belt for the edges, about a quarter-inch in from each side.

Then I dampened the leather some more and traced the pattern, following with the swivel knife. The pattern is really intricate and tedious, so I did each step in small sections to make it more interesting: trace, knife, trace, knife, and so on.

The following picture shows me cutting the pattern with the swivel knife. The idea is that you pull the knife towards you, swiveling it along the traced line with your thumb and third-fifth fingers while your index finger keeps the knife steady.

Here is a picture of the pattern, partly traced and partly cut:

The trick with the swivel knife is that is has to be really well sharpened and polished all the time. Mine wasn't sharp enough--it isn't completely sharp when you buy it, so you have to sharpen it more yourself. If you don't, you get "drag" on the blade as you go along, and the cuts aren't as smooth as they should be. It's hard to see in the picture, but my cut lines are a little jagged.

Here I started tooling the pattern as I went along, mostly with a patterned beveling tool:

As I mentioned in my post on riveting, I often jump straight into a project without doing quite enough practicing or testing first. I did in this case, and found that for my particular pattern I didn't have quite the right beveling or patterning tools to give me exactly the look I wanted. I ended up doing a bit of rework right on the belt as I tried out different tools. Fortunately the rework didn't show much (and perfection is a bad thing, right?).

Here is the tooled belt at the buckle end. The pattern and tooling goes all the way to the other end of the belt (the billet end).

Dyeing to Dye

A big reason for doing this third belt was to try using dyes that were separate from the finish, instead of the Tandy's Eco-Flo All-in-One. This time I was using Tandy's Eco-Flo Leather Dye. Also, for this belt I was doing different colors for the different threads of the chain pattern.

Here you can see how the different colors (Deep Violet, Emerald Green, and Evening Blue) weave together:

Then I added the dark brown background (Dk. Coco Brown):

If I had stopped here, I probably would have been fairly happy with the colors. However, the process recommended by the guys at the shop was to clean off the excess dye using a soft cloth and Lexol leather conditioner. I did that, trying to avoid mixing my several colors (mostly getting my green and purple muddied with brown), and my belt ended up looking very faded:

I then put a second painstaking coat of dyes on the entire belt and cleaned it again with the Lexol. It looked only slightly better than it did in the picture above, but since painting the separate colors was such a pain, I decided it was good enough.

I covered the back of the belt in the dark brown. The Lexol didn't take off as much of the dye from the back (the rough "flesh side" instead of the smooth "skin side").

Here is how it looked after the second coat and cleaning (and hole punching):

Dyeing to Finish

I used Tandy Carnauba Creme as the finish for the belt. It's basically a blend of waxes in a water base. You smooth it on using a soft cloth (I've been using cut-up pieces of a worn out t-shirt). When the creme dries, you buff it with more cloth until the leather shines. When I was applying the creme, I found that quite a bit more dye came off onto the cloth. Just a little more dye comes off during the buffing stage, though (whew!).

I did find that the most finely-textured (stippled) parts of the belt design still showed little white spots of wax after the buffing with cloth. An old soft toothbrush in a gentle circular motion worked for those.

Here is the final belt. Not that I'm keeping score, but this one probably took me 30-40 hours to make (instead of 8 hours each for the blue and brown ones). Carving and tooling the pattern for this belt definitely took longer, but the big timesink came with the careful multiple coats of multiple colors.

In general, I'm not particularly happy with the way the colors came out. The purple looks more like pink, and the whole thing is a little too "distressed"-looking for my tastes. But my daughter cheerfully snatched it up and carted it off before I could change my mind about giving it to her, so I guess it's good by definition!

Solvent Salvation

California, where I live, has imposed a lot of environmental restrictions on volatile organic compounds (VOCs), that is, all the really useful and effective (and harmful) solvents. This means that many manufacturers have had to reformulate dyes, paints, and such to eliminate or lower their use of the "bad" solvents. Tandy's Eco-Flo dyes and other products are the water-based response to lowering the VOCs.

The "old-timers" who hang out and do their leather work together on Saturday mornings at the local Tandy store shake their heads sadly and say that it's just not like the good old days where you could dye your leather and get a good high at the same time. Well, they don't really say that, but the old solvents were very good at carrying dyes deep into the leather, and water, while the ultimate solvent of life, just isn't quite so good for leather dye. They do say the new dyes just don't work quite so well as the old versions. But that's life in California, and clean air is definitely a good cause.

Lacey Investigates

Lacey is pretty diligent about investigating objects left on the kitchen floor. Food? Treats? Toys? Those nasty VOCs?

Nope, no VOC problem here. A few treats would be nice, though...

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