Embossing Leather With A Pipe Bender And 3D Printed Tooling

December 20, 2024 by Lewin Day 12 Comments

Embossed leather belts can be deliciously stylish. However, the tooling for making these fashionable items is not always easy to come by, and it rarely comes cheap. What do we do when a tool is expensive and obscure? We 3D print our own, as [Myth Impressions] demonstrates.

The build is based around a Harbor Freight pipe bender. However, instead of the usual metal tooling, it’s been refitted with a printed embossing ring specifically designed for imprinting leather. The tool features raised ridges in an attractive pattern, and the pipe bender merely serves as a straightforward device for rolling the plastic tooling over a leather belt blank. Once cranked through the machine, the leather belt comes out embossed with a beautiful design.

It’s a neat project, and the 3D printed tooling works surprisingly well. The key is that leather is relatively soft, so it’s possible to use plastic tools quite effectively. With that said, you can even form steel with printed tooling if you use the right techniques.

We’ve seen some other neat leatherworking hacks before, like this nicely-modified Singer sewing machine.

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Bigfoot Turns Classic Sewing Machine Into A Leather-Eating Monster

November 18, 2023 by Dan Maloney 12 Comments

If you try to sew leather on a standard consumer-grade machine, more often than not you’ll quickly learn its limits. Most machines are built for speed, and trying to get them to punch through heavy material at the low motor speeds often needed for leather work is a lesson in frustration.

How frustrating? Enough so that [Joseph Eoff] expended considerable effort to create this sewing machine speed controller for his nearly century-old Adler sewing machine. The machine was once powered by a foot treadle, which is probably why the project is dubbed “Bigfoot,” but now uses a 230 V universal motor. Such motors don’t deliver much torque when run at low speeds with the standard foot-pedal rheostat control, so [Joseph] worked up an Arduino-based controller with a tachometer for feedback and a high-power PWM driver for the motor.

There are a ton of details in [Joseph]’s post and even more in the original blog article, which is well worth a read, but a couple really stand out. The first is with the tachometer, which uses an off-the-shelf photointerrupter and slotted disc. [Joseph] was displeased with the sensor’s asymmetrical and unreliable output, so he made some modifications to the onboard comparator to square up the signal. Also interesting is the PID loop auto-tuning function he programmed into Bigfoot; press a button and the controller automatically ramps the motor speed up and down and stores the coefficients in memory. Nice!

The short video below shows Bigfoot in action with varying thicknesses of faux leather; there are also some clips in the original article that show the machine dealing with a triple thickness of leather at slow speed and not even breaking a sweat. Hats off to [Joseph] on a solid build that keeps a classic machine in the game. And if you want to get into the textile arts but don’t know where to start, we’ve got you covered.

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Adjustable, Piston-Damped Hammer

April 19, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 27 Comments

When all you have is a hammer, every problem is a constant quest for an even better hammer, as the popular saying goes. At least, that seems to be [Ebenisterie Éloïse]’s situation. She wanted a deadblow hammer that not only had an aesthetically pleasing wood and brass construction, but also one that included adjustable dampers to make sure that each hammer swing is as efficient as possible.

For those unfamiliar with specialty hammers, dead blow hammers typically have some movable mass such as sand or lead shot within the hammer head. This mass shifts forward when the hammer strikes an object, reducing rebound of the hammer off of the object and transferring more energy into each strike. This hammer omits a passive mass in favor of four custom-machined brass tubes, each of which holds a weighted fluid, a spring, and brass weight. Each piston acts as a damper in a similar way to a shock absorber on a vehicle, and a screw and o-ring at the top of each one allows them to be adjustable by adding different weight fluids as needed. Some detailed testing of the pistons shows a marked improvement over any of the passive mass varieties as well.

Not only is this an incredible amount of detail and precision for a tool that is often wielded in a non-precise way (at least among those of us for who aren’t skilled craftspeople), but it is also made out of wood, leather, and brass which gives it an improved look and feel over a plastic and fiberglass hammer that is typical of most modern deadblow hammers. It even rivals this engineer’s hammer with its intricate custom engraving in craftsmanship alone.

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Loads Of Testing Yields New, Reliable, And Cheap Leather Hardening Technique

May 26, 2019 by Donald Papp 36 Comments

Leather hardening has been around for such a long time that one might think that there was little left to discover, but [Jason F. Timmermans] certainly showed that is not the case. Right around the end of 2018 he set up experiments to compare different techniques for hardening leather, and empirically determine the best options. After considerable effort, he crafted a new method with outstanding results. It’s part of his exhaustive testing of different techniques for hardening leather, including some novel ones. It was a considerable amount of work but [Jason] says that he gathered plenty of really useful information, which we’re delighted that he took the time to share it.

According to [Jason], the various methods of hardening can be separated into four groups:

Thermal: heat-treating at 180 ºF or higher, usually via some kind of boiling or baking process.
Chemical: soaking in a substance that causes changes in the leather. Some examples include ammonia, vinegar, acetone, brine, and alcohol.
Mechanical: hammering the leather.
“Stabilizing” methods: saturating the leather with a substance to add rigidity and strength without otherwise denaturing the leather itself. Examples include beeswax, pine pitch, stearic acid, and epoxy.

We recommend making the time to follow the link in the first paragraph and read the full results, but to summarize: heat-treating generally yields a strong but brittle product, and testing revealed stearic acid — which resembles a kind of hard, dense wax at room temperature — was an early standout for overall great results. Stearic acid has many modern uses and while it was unclear from [Jason]’s reasearch exactly when in history it became commonplace, at least one source mentioned it as a candidate for hardening leather.

But the story doesn’t stop there. Unsatisfied with simply comparing existing methods, [Jason] put a lot of work into seeing if he could improve things. One idea he had was to combine thermal treatment with a stabilizer, and it had outstanding results. The winning combination (named X1 in his writeup) was to preheat the leather then immerse it in melted stearic acid, followed by bringing the temperature of the combination to 200 ºF for about a minute to heat treat the leather at the same time. [Jason]’s observation was that this method “[B]lew the rest out of the water. Cutting the sample to view the cross section was like carving wood. The leather is very rigid and strong.”

The world may not revolve around leather the way it used to, but there’s still stuff to learn and new things to discover. For example, modern tools can allow for novel takes on old techniques, like using 3D printing to create custom leather embossing jigs.

Easily Deboss Notebooks With A 3D Printed Stamp

December 9, 2018 by Tom Nardi 14 Comments

While it’s arguably a bit closer to the “Arts & Crafts” region of the making spectrum upon which we don’t usually tread on account our l33t sense of superiority, we’ve got to admit that the quick and easy notebook customization demonstrated by [Sean Hodgins] is very compelling. We don’t put ink to dead trees with nearly the frequency we used to, but when we do it might as well be Hemingway-style with a little black Hackaday emblazoned notebook.