Understand How a Swivel Knife Affects Leather Working

Video Transcript

"The swivel knife is a really great tool that takes some practice to learn how to use it. It's kind of a heavy, cylinder gold casing for the blade here. Remember these blades are interchangeable by this little flat head screw. It will swivel all the way around 360 degrees at this point here. Then it kind of has this U shaped kind of a part here that you really just kind place your finger in. The way that you hold a swivel knife is sort of like this. You have your finger kind of in the U shape cradle here. This part, the cylinder, it's knurled, so it's sort of textured. You can kind of grip that with your thumb and your fingers. You can really sort of turn that blade around like this. The function of that cradle is to have the finger that's in there provide the downward pressure on the knife, but because the knife swivels, you don't have to be moving your whole hand to provide that downward pressure. All you really need to be doing if you want to do a curve cut is to be rotating the blade with your fingers as you're cutting. Therefore, the swivel knife can be used for making cuts that a lot more complexed in terms of their curds. The same thing applies though about not really making sure it doesn't lean too much to the left or the right. Try and keep it straight up and down. With practice, you can really use the swivel knife and cut some pretty elegant curves. You can see I'm turning it with my fingers as I'm applying downward pressure with my finger on top. This is a curve that you'd never be able to get with kind of more the straight knife."