How to Utilize Letters in Leather Working

Video Transcript

"So, I want to say a little bit about letter tools which are single action tools and then we'll move on to the double action tools. A lot of people like to put names on their leather projects or maybe even write like a little slogan on there, I don't know. There are different kinds of letter tools you can use. Just a couple of things to keep in mind. First of all, you really want to make sure, especially with letters, that you hold the tool kind of in one place and really don't let it drift. It's really good, especially with letter tools, if you can get it in one strike. That would be easier with smaller letters, here's a set of kind of small, they look about, a little bit larger than quarter inch, so these, if the letter is well cased, you can kind of give it a good whack and in most cases get a pretty good letter impression. That's the letter "N" as you can see. You know, same is true, these are some actually really small letter stamps that we got from a hardware store that were mainly used for I think doing impressions on steel tools. But they actually work with leather working really well. I mean, this is a little "W" here and things like this are really easy. You just kind of give it, you don't need to give it much of a tap at all and there's your letter. Some of these larger letter stamps like this that are used for like big belts, western style belts. Again, you know, it can be a little bit more challenging to get a full on impression of that letter. So sometimes what you have to do is kind of give it a nice little whack first of all, maybe two, and then check it, and if you're impression is good, see in this case that impression is a little bit light. What you can do then is case it again with some more water and then if you put that stamp back on it you can sort of feels where that impression was. You kind of have to move it around but then eventually the raised areas of the stamp will kind of fall back kind of into the groves. Then when you feel if you have it in place, as long as it's in place again, you can give it a few more whacks. Ah ha! See, now here you can see it moved and so I kind of mess up there because my tool moved, and so you see I kind of have multiple impressions here. So this is a good example of why it's important with single action tools to try and get it in as few strokes as you can and if you have to give it multiple whacks, make sure it doesn't move in between."