Help! Boer War Leatherworking Advice Needed

**Nighthawk** · 27th April 11, 09:42 AM

Originally Posted by artificer

That's not entirely true. Assuming the leather was aniline dyed (most are, as it stabilizes the hide) and then surface dyed (which it obviously was) you cannot tell what the underlying colour actually is. You cannot assume that the colour is "struck through".

The inner colour could vary from white to off-white, all the way down to buff.

Scott, you are a never ending source of information!

**artificer** · 27th April 11, 10:50 AM

Originally Posted by Nighthawk

Scott, you are a never ending source of information!

If only my wife agreed with you LOL!

ith:

**Joe Gondek** · 28th April 11, 09:33 PM

Look on the bright side , if doesn't turn out you will still have a full scale pattern to make a set out of the corect leather.

**BobsYourUncle** · 4th May 11, 05:43 PM

Originally Posted by budd4766

I concur. And I'd be afraid if you tried to "fix" it by sanding, you're probably going to do a lot more damage than you want trying to make it look authentic. If you're REALLY serious about it being suede and adding white stuff to it, I'd probably use the pieces/parts you've got as a pattern and go get some roughed-out leather or suede to make new stuff from.

There's also a few places that can take leather and refinish it to match pretty much any color you want to match. My wife knows some people in Memphis, TN that do this, though it's pretty expensive. If you want, I'll get details and maybe they can help you take that route. Just let me know.

Originally Posted by Joe Gondek

Look on the bright side , if doesn't turn out you will still have a full scale pattern to make a set out of the corect leather.

As you both have noted, if the sanding doesn't get me where I need to go, I can take the whole thing apart and use the parts as pattern, then disassemble the metal hardware for use in my new set. I have a couple of sources for buff leather, having made several smaller kit items in buff leather in the past [white sporran belts]. If all else fails, it may be a better use of my time and effort to do just that.

**BobsYourUncle** · 4th May 11, 05:55 PM

Haven't had time in the past several days to do very much with this project, but I did get an assortment of sandpaper, 220 grit, 400-b grit, sanding block and sand paper for my palm-sized detail sander.

I took a stab at sanding on the "back" of the bayonet frog, and took a close look at several areas of the equipment. It appears that on some elements of the equipment, the hard "patent" finish is only on one side. The non-patent side has a little white coloring on it, but no additional surface. The non-patent side would rough up quite readily.

On the "patent leather" side, the preliminary outcome is that surface seems to sand o.k., but I haven't really gotten down on it yet. I need to be able to spend a little time and employ some elbow grease to get a real sense of what will happen with some sustained sanding. I will say that I think I may have to take Artificer up on one of his suggestions, and go at it with a wire brush before sanding.

I have also ordered some Deglazer from Feibings, as PaulHenry has suggested. I may wait until that comes in, and use it on a test piece, before trying to tackle the whole project. If an application of Deglazer can strip the hard suface coating, I may be able to seriously short cut the whole process. I will post further as we go. Thanks all for your great advice. Cheers!