How to Use a Single-Action Tool on Leather Working

Video Transcript

"Okay, so a single-action tool, remember, the single action that it has is a downward action where it's making an impression. And, so , here I have a piece of case leather, and, really, you know, in a best, best of all possible worlds, best case scenario, you want to be able to make that impression with one strike of your mallet. And, it's not always as easy as that sounds, because you kind of need to have a lot of practice hitting that tool kind of firmly and directly. So, if I was going to do a single action with this tool, this is kind of a five-pointed star, I've already cased this leather out, you place the tool, you make sure that it's vertical. Not all the time, but if you do have a straight design like any of these, a flower or star or something where you want the whole design in your impression, you want to make sure it's vertical. I'll talk in a little bit about examples where you might want to have the tool at an angle. But, for most single action tools, you have the tool perfectly vertical and you just want to give it a nice square hit on the top of the tool with, not all the strength you can muster, but you want to do it pretty firmly. So you can go like...and there, I've done that once. Single action. I take the tool away. And, you see, there's our little impression, kind of that tool there. Now this one was sort of easy because it was small. It's a small design, and so there's a lot force that is sort of applied when I hit it with the mallet. If I take something like this, the flower, and again, the leather's already been cased, you might not get as deep of an impression with one single hit just because that force is dispersed over a little bit larger area. So, we can try it and see. So, I have it nice up and down, single action tool, it?s just going to have a downward motion. So, we pull that away and, actually, that one stamped pretty good. Okay. But, some other ones, like, for example, here's a set of alphabet letters. These are also single-action tools. And you can see these are getting even larger. And so the way something like this works is, I don't know, we can take a letter, this is the letter "r," and, we'll kind of, kind of fit it on the end of this shaft here. And you'll see with ones like this, it might be even harder to kind of get that impression in one wack. So, I'll, I?ll try it with one sort of single action wack here. So, we pick this up, and it's probably, see, there's kind of a faint impression. It wasn't really straight up and down. You see how it's kind of deeper here and fainter there. Fortunately, a lot of these tools, you can kind of, you can sort of feel it, and kind of line that stamp back up into the grooves, like kind of moving it around. You can feel it line up again. So, sometimes you might need to hit it a couple times if it's a larger tool. But the important thing is, is that tool isn't moving, okay? It's staying in the same place. So, there. Okay, it's, we've done a little bit better job there kind of getting an impression. Okay. So that's a single action tool; a tool that doesn't move away from the place where you've set it while you're wacking it. You'd like to do it ideally in one hit, but sometimes with larger ones, you have to do it with multiple ones. So that's a single-action tool, and then, to be contrasted with a double action tool."