Chuck is back with more Shop Tricks! In this video, Chuck goes over how to create a five-pointed star pattern, how to avoid making a mess with your dye gloves, and tricks to consider the next time you use black dye for a project. Let us know if these shop tricks worked for you, and drop your own tricks in the comment section below!
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0:28 As leathercrafters we tend to use a five-pointed star relatively often. I know I do, particularly for tooling or for painted designs or stamping or even wet form molds. Well, they're easy enough to draw out. We don't need a template and we can make these any size, super easy to do. So let's start right here. Remember the old the protractor from high school? I think that actually is my protractor from high school. So let's start right here. Now, important note, let's mark our center point. That's going to be a big help here in just a minute. So let's make a mark at the top and the bottom and let's draw this in on both sides. Okay, we've got a good circle now. 360 degrees, if we divide that by 5 that's 72. So let's drop this back down on our marks and I'm going to come down 72 degrees, let's make a mark. Okay, 72 times 2 is 144. So let's come down and make a mark at 144. Let's flip it over do the same thing on the other side. And 144, okay, let's do this. Let's keep from getting confused here, let's make a mark on that, yeah you'll see why here in a minute. All right, so let's connect the balance of the lines, and there we have our five-pointed star.
3:40 This may not seem like such a critical issue, but in all honesty, I've ruined a couple of projects or at least parts of projects because of this problem. You'll see where we're going with this. So these are gloves just from any grocery store or pharmacy. We use these for dyeing or adding antique. Well I love the higher quality glove, just feels to me a little bit more durable. Well, the problem is not the quality, actually the color is the problem. I can't tell if I've dyed something with these or not. Here's where I'm going with this. So we've got a panel here, we're going to dye this in a light brown, say medium brown saddle tan and if recently we've dyed something in black or dark brown, the second we touch that leather with that glove it's going to leave a big smudge. It's not going to go anywhere and in fact, I'm going to consider that piece or that panel absolutely ruined.
4:51 I tend to use wet forming on a number of projects, evidently more than I think I do. I've got a big box of the forms but it looks very professional and it's so easy to do. We've got some good videos on this. Well as leathercrafters, we're comfortable cutting leather, gluing leather, but also we've got scrap so we can make some pretty solid forms in our shop. Well here's the downside. As we place wet leather on this and form to it, well this is going to get wet too, so our edge it's going to start to soften, start to round, and we're not going to get a good crisp corner on that. Well this will work for one, two, maybe three times but after that, those edges get soft. Well, here's where I'm going with this. A jigsaw is one of the biggest helps to me in my shop. Now your first thought, mine too, I'm not a woodworker. We don't have to be, in fact we don't even need special electrical requirements for this. Now a pair of safety glasses absolutely but this is so easy to operate. We can simply cut wood absolutely make a very simple male female mold or right here. This will actually cut pretty good round corners. Now I might say let's sand those but still, those are pouch pockets, very easy to do. This is a big help. So we did a video on our six by six inch cinch pouch, well this is our pattern. Let's take a piece of paneling and we can find this at any hardware store, very inexpensive. Let's add our non-slip tape to the back, so now I can lay that on my leather, put some force on it, and I can simply cut right to my pattern.
6:45 When the old school folks talk, I always listen. They always have good advice and I may change the way I go with this. First piece of advice, I've always heard that if you want to get a good deep black, die with blue first then come back in with your black and I've got to say, that's a deep black. Also we can wet our leather before we add our dye. Now, it's not a lot of water content in that but just a little bit. But again a very deep black. Right here we've got a piece of leather that I've simply added dye, so let's add a top coat to all three of these let's see what happens. Well there we go, right off the bat I’ve got to say that is a beautiful rich black, very deep and I love how that's taking my top coat.