Accoutrements has become my favorite spot on this forum because there are so many of you who, in stitching by hand, create some really good looking stuff. This post is for those guys who are using off the shelf hole punchers, large harness needles and maybe a clamp to stitch to the point where you are wondering how you can cut labor time ( if doing this for money) , grow the margin by cutting the cost and make a tighter stitch without holes the size of the Holland Tunnel.
In 1975 when I apprenticed under my Master at Bethpage Village, the first thing he taught me was to taper thread ends, use smaller harness needles/bristles, personalize my awl and use a clamp.
He was so precise as to be gifted in the way he worked, and I still not have cleared his bar. He promised me that using marking wheels, working carefully and gaining experience would streamline my stitching and he was dead on right.
HOWEVER…I could never ‘whip the cat” and close a seam as fast as he could. Sort of like playing the five string for years and never being a close second to Earl Scruggs. To make tight stitches, well waxed with minimum sized holes and without needles the size of ten penny nails, I had to work slowly. In the nineteenth century work, when machine work started to take over, my Singer Patcher proved fine. But the 18th Century work was always laborious because I had to carefully keep each stitch straight and even.
Make sure you peruse the forum for all those guys complaining about eyesight. That’s what drove this. Just when I started worrying about my accuracy as my eyesight weakened, a solution fell out of a tree on me. Do some YouTube searches on stitching with bristles and tapering thread ends. Then do one on “Cobbler Sewing Machine” out of China. I call it the Mig-15 because it is the biggest piece of junk that ever did its job well. It is cheap, cumbersome, marginally engineered and has a manual so bad that you gotta go back to YouTube just to learn how to keep it functional….IF…you want to stitch with it. Yuch…
You can stop here if you fancy yourself as a purist and enjoy working exclusively by hand.
The first thing I did was to strip off anything having to do with thread or bobbins. No way this thing was going to stitch any of my work. I had to mount it on a special bench because the three legs it came with wouldn’t hold up tomatoes.
The needle was lauded as being able to poke holes through tires, That wasn’t bad until I took a close look at the regulators on stitch length, and needle attachment. Summa Gum…I betcha I could make use of some of my pegging awls here. I dug through the prescription bottle that housed about fifty and pulled one of the pegging blades, ground the little flat at the top of the blade so it would mount on the machine and then ground AND POLISHED ( YOU GOTTA POLISH) the blade. How you shape your awl blade will govern the size and type of the hole you want. I LIKE TO DIAMOND SHAPE MY BLADES because that’s the way I was taught. There is a little regulator nut above that chunky cylinder to govern how far the needle goes into the bobbin hole. There is also a little nut under the main arm that governs footer advance and stitch length
Again, vision was the main driver for trying this thing, but every fourth or fifth project I still stitch the old time way my Master taught me just to stay in shape. The rest of the time I still scribe the lines by hand, but stabbing with this guy makes everything go a lot faster providing you guide carefully with your left hand while turning the cumbersome crank with your right. Once in the clamp, closing is easier on my awl because all I am doing is clarifying and shaping the hole rather than making it. Works great on the stiffer cowhide and just as well with a paper bag backer on softer, more supple leathers such as deer and elk. It is strong enough to go through buffler, too.
Sacrilege and Heresy notwithstanding, I’d recommend that you take a look at this contraption especially if the volume of your work justifies it. Maybe do what I’ve done with it…IF…you are willing to tinker so that you get your stabbing holes the way you want and the finished experiments produce stitches that are tight, even, and don’t betray the use of this Frankenmachine. You can search for the thing and find it in the $189 to $200 range. Then you can make the decision as to whether or not it’s worth it. I can do a bag in about four hours if I concentrate on it. Shoe uppers in about twenty minutes. I don’t age my work, but my stitching is consistent with 18th century specimens.
Tight Stitches
Capgun
