Spur Straps a WIP

[Horsewright]

Thought I'd do a lil WIP on a pair of spur straps I made lately. Here, they are, pictured with a much older personal pair. While you might say to yourself, I'm not gonna make spur straps, the techniques involved apply to so much else in leatherwork.

This style of spur strap has several names. Buckaroo Style spur leathers, Bib Style, Two Piece style etc. We use to freehand cut this project and that was really tricky to get the parts symmetrical. So we had a set of dies built.

A left and a right bib portion and a strap. If I were to do it again I would only have one bib die done. You don't need a left and a right. You know why? Cut one out flip your leather over and cut the second out. You now have a left and a right. We'll set this up on a piece of suitable leather and then put it in the press.

This is my press. Nothing fancy, air over hydraulic. This was a Harbor Freight 20 ton press. Swapped out the jack, (I traded a knife for the air jack) and had a local welder weld on a 1/2" steel plate to provide uniform pressure over a wide enough area. The steel plate on the bottom just rests there. It's not welded to the frame like the top one.

Those are my shop heaters underneath stored there when not in use and the dumbbells and bungee cords hold down my tent when I'm grinding outside in the summer. Hold the handle and the plate lowers onto the dies pushing them through the leather.

You will hear it go "clunk" when it cuts through. Raise that plate and retrieve your parts.

So we'll need one more strap so I repeat with just the one die so that we'll have two straps and two bibs.

I'll dampen the parts and slick them and then put in the stitching groove as all four parts of the strap set will be lined and stitched.

This pair was ordered with a Carlos Border stamp and 2" diameter silver conchos. So I will do all tooling and highlighting prior to stitching in the lining, Starting on the Carlos Border stamp:

The strap parts don't have room for the Carlos stamp so I do this on these pieces. Ya have to be careful with the makers mark to make sure you do a left and a right.

So then I'll highlight the tooling with my own special concoction:

Once they are dry from the highlighting and the finish I will glue on the lining leather.

Then it's time to sew. We'll use our smaller Cobra 18, flatbed machine for this project. It produces a smaller more refined stitch than my larger machine I use for sheaths and holsters. Perfect for this application but then the smaller machine won't sew those larger projects. There is not an universal machine.

All four pieces sewn up. I'll use a fine tipped soldering iron to cut the excess threads.

Hope this lil WIP is of interest to you. I'll be finishing it off here shortly. Comments and questions are very welcome.

 

[nick681]

Nice work!

I've been thinking of a similar setup for clicking out parts. Any advice or things to look out for?

 

[Horsewright]

Thank you for the kind words!

Yes sir. For the hobbyist or even for a smaller output pro like ourselves, I’d recommend cobbling a press together like we did. There are commercial ones available but they start at 2K for a hand operated one and go to about 8K and thats just my supplier. So a guy could drop a lot of $$$$ on an outfit and never really getting to pay it off.

Dies are expensive. Really about the only thing I use this deal for is the spur straps. I do have some dies for sheaths but don’t use them. Since I fit each individual sheath to that specific knife it just wasn’t working out. I jsut needed way to many dies. And then I was trimming it to fit anyways so it wasn’t really saving me time. The other thing I ran into was my sheath designs have and do evolve. I haven’t sued my sheath dies in 10-12 years

On the other hand I have a buddy that has several monstrous clicker presses. One is literally so big he can cut out a whole chap leg out and does. He is the guy though that this whole process works out for well. He does leather work for the studios and movies. He needs Repeatability. for instance he made 200 pairs of boots for Thor. Repeatability really works on his deal as well as time savings.

The advantage it gives me is each spur straps is exactly the same. I’m not trying to make something cut out by hand a mirror image of another one cut out by hand.

 

[jfk1110]

Thought I'd do a lil WIP on a pair of spur straps I made lately. Here pictured with a much older personal pair. While you might say to yourself, I'm not gonna make spur straps, the techniques involved apply to so much else in leatherwork.

This style of spur strap has several names. Buckaroo Style spur leathers, Bib Style, Two Piece style etc. We use to freehand cut this project and that was really tricky to get the parts symmetrical. So we had a set of dies built.

A left and a right bib portion and a strap. If I were to do it again I would only have one bib die done. You don't need a left and a right. You know why? Cut one right one out say and then flip the leather over. Cut it out and now you have a right and a left. We'll set this up on a piece of suitable leather and then put it in the press.

This is my press. Nothing fancy air over hydraulic. This was a Harbor Freight 20 ton press. Swapped out the jack (traded a knife for the air jack) and had a local welder weld on a 1/2" steel plate to provide uniform pressure over a wide enough area.

Those are my shop heaters underneath stored there when not in use and the dumbbells and bungee cords hold down my tent when I'm grinding outside in the summer. Hold the handle and the plate lowers onto the dies pushing them through the leather.

You will hear it go "clunk" when it cuts through. Raise that plate and retrieve your parts.

So we'll need one more strap so I repeat with just the one die so that we'll have two straps and two bibs.

I'll dampen the parts and slick them and then put in the stitching groove as all four parts of the strap set will be lined and stitched.

This pair was ordered with a Carlos Border stamp and 2" diameter silver conchos. So I will do all tooling and highlighting prior to stitching in the lining, Starting on the Carlos Border stamp:

The strap parts don't have room for the Carlos stamp so I do this on these pieces:

So then I'll highlight the tooling with my own special concoction:

Once they are dry from the highlighting and the finish I will glue on the lining leather.

Then it's time to sew. We'll use our smaller Cobra 18 flatbed machine for this project.

All four pieces sewn up. I'll use a fine tipped soldering iron to cut the excess threads.

Hope this lil WIP is of interest to you. I'll be finishing it off here shortly. Comments and questions are very welcome.

A pleasure to follow along....

 

[Horsewright]

Thanks! Should have some time this morning to finish this off.

 

[Horsewright]

Moving on with our WIP:

After trimming the excess thread from sewing I will then trim all the excess lining leather off. I use a roundknife for this as it goes around the tight curves so much better than other types of knives.

I will then sand the edges of the parts getting the top leather and the lining leather even. Since my friend Coleman, at Sharp & Fiery , said I couldn't show my Cobra Finisher any more I didn't take any pics of this step! The finisher sanding drum won't fit down into the two tight inside curves on the bib part. So to sand this area I use a 1/2" drum on my Dremel. After sanding I will bevel the edges, a #2 on top and a #3 on the bottom side. This inlays the lining leather a little and seem to help the lining leather from peeling back during use. After beveling the edges I will rub the edges using the finisher. My favorite rubbing compound these days is water and then paraffin. The friction from the finisher drives the wax into the leather forming a nice finished, glossy, burnished edge. I always put two coats of Bag Kote on the edges after burnishing. This seems to hold the fibers down more and make your nice edge last longer. All the parts:

So now we'll start punching holes in our work. Always gives me the heebbie jeebies a lil. Spent all that time making some nice work and then we haul out the punches and start making hole in it!

After many years of wearing and using my own spur straps I've settled on 3/4" spacing for the straps. Use to use 1" but it seemed like I was always punching a hole beteen a hole to get them to fit right. 3/4" is just about right. I'll use my dividers to mark the holes and then I punch them:

To cut the slit from the spur button hole in the center I use a 1" wood chisel. Makes a nice refined slit. This slit allows the customer to mount the straps on his spurs without fighting them too much.

We have a template to mark the slots that need to be punched in the bib part. As this pair will have conchos, the round hole in the round part of the bib won't be marked. We would use that hole and finish it out with a slit like above if this pair had not been ordered with the silver conchos. The two slots on the left will allow the strap to connect to the bib. The other slot is for the buckle billet.

We use two different 1" slot or bag punches. The polished one on the left makes a more refined thinner hole. It's a Weaver. The black one on the right, an Osborne, makes a wider hole which allows the strap to pass through easily.

Time to make the two buckle billets needed. I grab a 3/4" strap scrap out of my scrap box. I use water buffalo for this and the piece needs to be more than 8"s long. First thing I'll do is split it. I'll take it from 8/9 oz, down to 4/5 oz. This makes a better buckle billet. Look Coleman! A hand operated machine! Don't worry got the Cobra splitter in my sights, although a Cobra 26 might come first!

I'll edge and burnish the strap and then cut it into two four inch lengths. A center 1" slot is cut and the ends are skived to zero. A 4" strap seems to make the right size billet for just about any project we do, not just spur straps.

We fold them around the buckle and use a rivet to close the billet on the buckle. The finished billet is placed through the corresponding slot in the bib and riveted down. This is where the work we did splitting the billet strap and then skiving it further, pays off. You don't have a big wad of leather rubbing on your boot under the buckle.

These are what are known as bridle loop conchos. We'll use a D shaped kinda arrowhead thingy to hold them on and to attach the bib part to the spur. Here's the conchos and the D shapes:

I cut the D shapes out of thin, firm scrap, using a 2 inch half round punch:

I use the loop on the concho to mark another slot on the bib and then punch it. It is slightly off center on purpose. It's a hair to the right. If you do it actually centered then your customers will be cussing you because they will really have to fight to get the bib part on their spur. Or you can make the tab of your arrowhead thingy extra long but then it hangs out from behind the bib and looks like heck. Trust me on this one, slightly off center works the best.

So ya whittle those D shapes. They are very important. Not only do they hold the concho onto the spur strap but they hold the spur strap to the spurs. Picture is worth a thousand words here but this is what I meant by a D shape arrowhead thingy!

I use my dividers to measure the inside of the loop on the concho and then use the dividers to mark lines to cut the tab or shaft part of the arrowhead. There is some fitting here and I'll usually cut it too wide and shave off a lil as we go fitting it exactly. We want that tab to go through the loop but to fit tight. The tab end has a similar hole and slit as the strap part does. The tab will then fit over the spur button holding the strap onto the spur. Just make sure your maker's mark is not upside down when you put all the parts together:

Here in these pics of an old pair of mine you can see the arrowhead thingy on the strap and the spur and the spur button on the strap:

Well they are finished. We make quite a few of these over the course of the year and offer a variety of tooling patterns. I have to make a plain roughout pair in a couple of days. I'll probably make a couple pair as we like to have a pair or two in stock on the website. We sell more of the plain roughout pair than any other.

Hope you enjoyed our lil WIP. Comments and questions are very welcome.

 

[MolokaiRider]

Functional art and some learnin' too!

Great thread and Mahalo for sharing your work and process.

 

[RLB0414]

Very nice work. Thanks for sharing it with us.

 

[Horsewright]

Functional art and some learnin' too!

Great thread and Mahalo for sharing your work and process.

Thank you my friend for the very kind words! You are welcome!

Very nice work. Thanks for sharing it with us.

You bet my friend!

 

[Sharp & Fiery]

Moving on with our WIP:

After trimming the excess thread from sewing I will then trim all the excess lining leather off. I use a roundknife for this as it goes around the tight curves so much better than other types of knives.

I will then sand the edges of the parts getting the top leather and the lining leather even. Since my friend Coleman, at Sharp & Fiery , said I couldn't show my Cobra Finisher any more I didn't take any pics of this step! The finisher sanding drum won't fit down into the two tight inside curves on the bib part. So to sand this area I use a 1/2" drum on my Dremel. After sanding I will bevel the edges, a #2 on top and a #3 on the bottom side. This inlays the lining leather a little and seem to help the lining leather from peeling back during use. After beveling the edges I will rub the edges using the finisher. My favorite rubbing compound these days is water and then paraffin. The friction from the finisher drives the wax into the leather forming a nice finished, glossy, burnished edge. I always put two coats of Bag Kote on the edges after burnishing. This seems to hold the fibers down more and make your nice edge last longer. All the parts:

So now we'll start punching holes in our work. Always gives me the heebbie jeebies a lil. Spent all that time making some nice work and then we haul out the punches and start making hole in it!

After many years of wearing and using my own spur straps I've settled on 3/4" spacing for the straps. Use to use 1" but it seemed like I was always punching a hole beteen a hole to get them to fit right. 3/4" is just about right. I'll use my dividers to mark the holes and then I punch them:

To cut the slit from the spur button hole in the center I use a 1" wood chisel. Makes a nice refined slit. This slit allows the customer to mount the straps on his spurs without fighting them too much.

We have a template to mark the slots that need to be punched in the bib part. As this pair will have conchos, the round hole in the round part of the bib won't be marked. We would use that hole and finish it out with a slit like above if this pair had not been ordered with the silver conchos. The two slots on the left will allow the strap to connect to the bib. The other slot is for the buckle billet.

We use two different 1" slot or bag punches. The polished one on the left makes a more refined thinner hole. It's a Weaver. The black one on the right, an Osborne, makes a wider hole which allows the strap to pass through easily.

Time to make the two buckle billets needed. I grab a 3/4" strap scrap out of my scrap box. I use water buffalo for this and the piece needs to be more than 8"s long. First thing I'll do is split it. I'll take it from 8/9 oz, down to 4/5 oz. This makes a better buckle billet. Look Coleman! A hand operated machine! Don't worry got the Cobra splitter in my sights, although a Cobra 26 might come first!

I'll edge and burnish the strap and then cut it into two four inch lengths. A center 1" slot is cut and the ends are skived to zero. A 4" strap seems to make the right size billet for just about any project we do, not just spur straps.

We fold them around the buckle and use a rivet to close the billet on the buckle. The finished billet is placed through the corresponding slot in the bib and riveted down. This is where the work we did splitting the billet strap and then skiving it further, pays off. You don't have a big wad of leather rubbing on your boot under the buckle.

These are what are known as bridle loop conchos. We'll use a D shaped kinda arrowhead thingy to hold them on and to attach the bib part to the spur. Here's the conchos and the D shapes:

I cut the D shapes out of thin, firm scrap, using a 2 inch half round punch:

I use the loop on the concho to mark another slot on the bib and then punch it. It is slightly off center on purpose. It's a hair to the right. If you do it actually centered then your customers will be cussing you because they will really have to fight to get the bib part on their spur. Or you can make the tab of your arrowhead thingy extra long but then it hangs out from behind the bib and looks like heck. Trust me on this one, slightly off center works the best.

So ya whittle those D shapes. They are very important. Not only do they hold the concho onto the spur strap but they hold the spur strap to the spurs. Picture is worth a thousand words here but this is what I meant by a D shape arrowhead thingy!

I use my dividers to measure the inside of the loop on the concho and then use the dividers to mark lines to cut the tab or shaft part of the arrowhead. There is some fitting here and I'll usually cut it too wide and shave off a lil as we go fitting it exactly. We want that tab to go through the loop but to fit tight. The tab end has a similar hole and slit as the strap part does. The tab will then fit over the spur button holding the strap onto the spur. Just make sure your maker's mark is not upside down when you put all the parts together:

Here in these pics of an old pair of mine you can see the arrowhead thingy on the strap and the spur and the spur button on the strap:

Well they are finished. We make quite a few of these over the course of the year and offer a variety of tooling patterns. I have to make a plain roughout pair in a couple of days. I'll probably make a couple pair as we like to have a pair or two in stock on the website. We sell more of the plain roughout pair than any other.

Hope you enjoyed our lil WIP. Comments and questions are very welcome.

You’re an absolute gentleman, Dave.

Thank you for not posting your stitching machine…it’s nice to not be jealous and depressed.

They look fantastic, my friend. Always an absolute pleasure to see your work.