[ Saw whirring ] ♪♪ Hi, I'm Phil.

This is "The Woodsmith Shop."

On today's episode, we're taking a totally different approach to tool organization and storage.

We're making a tool roll out of leather.

That's right.

We're gonna work with some leather pieces.

I'll show you how to cut, fit, glue, and stitch 'em all together.

There's some riveting action that's coming up on this and also some woodworking.

Logan's gonna be making a stitching pony for me that will make the process a whole lot easier.

If you're ready to make one along with us, the plans are at our website, woodsmithshop.com, and I say it's time to sew.

Announcer: Major funding for "The Woodsmith Shop" has been provided by... Old Masters.

Offering wood stains and finishes for the woodworking enthusiast and professional.

♪♪ And by... Kreg, tools designed by woodworkers for woodworkers.

Create what inspires you.

Additional funding provided by... ♪♪ Titebond wood glues, the pro's advantage.

♪♪ And by... ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Theme music plays ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ When it comes to woodworking projects, we join parts together using a variety of joints.

We might use dadoes or rabbets, tongues and grooves, mortise and tenon, or dovetails, and that's how we join those pieces of wood together to build our project.

But when it comes to something like a leatherworking project, like making this chisel roll, we use a different set of techniques.

Working with leather, we use contact cement and a lot of times we'll use hand stitching.

So our project today, making this leather tool roll, starts by building a jig to hold the leather together while we stitch it.

That's called a stitching pony.

This is simply a wooden vise that has its hinge on the bottom and it clamps to your workbench, and it offers a way to pinch the leather together so you can sew it.

Now, as I mentioned, the stitching pony is really a means to an end.

All it's meant to do is to pinch the leather as you work it, so it can be as simple or as fancy as you'd like.

In the plans, we have a fairly simple style stitching pony, and if you'd like a set of those plans, they're available at our website, woodsmithshop.com.

Now, I'm gonna change our stitching pony just slightly, just to make it a little bit nicer.

Not anything crazy, though.

So the first thing we're going to do is cut the parts to size.

Now, this stitching pony consists of two blocks that are gonna get a hinge attached to them, and those blocks are attached to the jaws.

And up top, the jaws have jaw faces that are tapered so that they pinch the leather just at the very end.

So, the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna rip all of our parts to width.

Alright.

Now, that is the jaws of our stitching pony.

Now we have a couple of things we have to add to this.

The first is going to be a hinge block that's gonna be on the bottom of each jaw.

And that is going to be a place to mount the hinge that's gonna allow this to pivot.

And then we're also going to add a jaw face up here.

And that will get tapered down, and we will also bevel the outside of both the jaw and that all at once in a little bit.

We'll add those at the workbench after we get them cut.

So I have a piece of thicker material here that we'll cut both that hinge block and the jaw face out of, and I'll just cut them to size.

I might leave them a little oversized.

That way when we have them glued on, we can flush trim them just so everything's neat and tidy.

Okay, so I've decided to use a little bit thicker piece for this clamping block.

I think it's just gonna offer a little bit more rigidity when this thing is clamped in place at the workbench.

So what I've done is loaded up the widest dado blade I can, but it's still too narrow for this one-inch-thick stock, which means we're gonna have to make this dado in two passes.

That's not that big a deal.

What I've done is I've positioned this clamping block where it's gonna sit on the backside of this jaw, and then I marked the edges of that with a marking knife.

Now I can go ahead, flip it over, line up those marks with the corners of the dado blade, and make a pass.

Once I make that first pass, I'll shut the blade off, let it come to a complete stop, and then slide the workpiece over and line up the opposite side.

Then I can make another pass to complete the dado to the full width.

Alright.

We're at the point where we can start gluing together some of these components to our stitching pony.

What we have, if you recall, is this hinge block that's gonna go on the bottom side of the jaw, and then we have the jaw face that's gonna go up at the top.

Now, I left these a little oversized and I'll flush trim those with the router table when everything has dried.

But I am going to glue at least the hinge block so that the bottoms are flush and that overhang is even on both sides.

The top jaw, however, I'm gonna position it so there's a little bit of an overhang.

And I'm gonna do that because we are gonna come in and cut a bevel across both the jaw and that jaw face at the table saw after the glue has cured.

So I'm just gonna use a square to make sure that it is... glued in place, square across the face of the jaw.

And that'll work.

Now, the final task after the glue has cured a bit and we've flushed the ends up, is to go ahead and bevel the top edge of the jaw and that jaw face.

To do that, I put a fine crosscut blade in the table saw and tilted it to 45 degrees.

Now, instead of using the sliding table, I'm gonna use the miter gauge with an auxiliary fence.

And I've also set a stop block here just so I have a place to slide the part up against.

And now I can go ahead and make that cut.

Really, the only thing we're doing here is providing a little bit of clearance for our hands as we are actually stitching leather together, so this doesn't have to be an exact measurement.

Now with our bevels cut, we can do our final assembly on this stitch pony.

The first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna glue this clamp block on to this back jaw.

And to do that I'm just gonna apply a little bit of glue in that dado.

And then we're gonna attach it with a pair of screws.

And because this is hard maple, I'm going to make sure I pre-drill both of those screw locations.

There's nothing worse than snapping a screw off midway through getting it home.

Okay.

Alright.

So as I mentioned, nothing's worse than breaking off screws, but breaking two off is worse than breaking off one.

So finally got another screw in there.

There we go.

So that is how that clamping block is gonna hold this stitching pony to the bench.

So now we have to go ahead and attach the hinge.

Now, this hinge is gonna mount on the hinge block down here.

And this doesn't have to be super accurate.

Just got to make sure it's centered, and I don't want it at an angle at all.

I want these jaws to close in line with each other.

So we'll go ahead and position those.

And once again we're gonna make sure we pre-drill these.

Now usually I would use a centering bit like this guy where it's spring loaded.

However, with this hard maple and how we just broke off a couple screws, I'm going to use a larger bit here... and just locate it in the center of the screw hole.

Okay.

Okay, now... ...we're gonna position... ...those in line, just like so.

And once again, pre-drill those.

Okay.

Now we can do some fine tuning.

Let's go and clamp this in place, and I'll show you what we need to fine tune, if anything.

Okay, so what I'm looking at here is I want to make sure that these jaws are closing top first, and they're not touching all the way down.

We want them just to have pressure at the very top where they're pinching that leather together as we are stitching up here.

And those look pretty good.

If they needed fine tuned at all, I could take a block plane and just plane away the bottom edge of those jaw faces.

And the other thing I'm looking at is I want to see that those jaws are fully closing.

We have a little bit of an opening on this end, which means I'm going to remove some material... about in this area here.

And we can do that just with the block plane again.

Okay.

That looks pretty good.

Now this is ready to be put to use.

But for that, I'm gonna hand this off to Phil to make a tool roll.

♪♪ As a natural product, leather isn't going to come to you necessarily in neat rectangular pieces.

It might be relatively misshapen, may not even have a straight edge on it.

This one does, thankfully, and it'll give us a head start on the layout process.

And that gets us to some of the tools that we're gonna need to work with leather.

Uh, for the layout, we're gonna grab just some of our regular woodworking tools.

I have a drafting triangle here and a metal straight edge.

I'm gonna lay out my pieces, measuring them based on the plans, and then mark those lines faintly with a pencil.

You could use a piece of chalk if you wanted to as well.

Makes the removing those marks relatively easily.

Now for cutting the leather... ...one option is a utility knife.

If you go this route, make sure you use a fresh, sharp blade on it.

That's gonna give you a smooth cut.

However, one of the drawbacks of a utility knife is that as you cut, you're actually pulling on the leather, and that can distort it as you're cutting, leaving you with kind of a ragged, wavy edge.

The cutting tool that I prefer is a rotary fabric cutting tool.

I actually have one of these in my shop for cutting all kinds of stuff.

I use it for veneer, cutting plastic or foam, things like that.

Think of it along the lines of a super sharp miniature pizza cutter, and you got the right idea.

Because it's rolling along, the fabric -- or the leather in this case -- isn't going to distort as you make a cut.

What you do is just line up a straight edge on your layout mark, and then follow along that with the cutting tool to make the slice.

You don't even have to put a lot of pressure on it.

Now, what you do need to do in order to preserve the life of the cutting tool is to cut on something like this.

It's a self-healing cutting mat.

It's just a plastic mat that, when the blade cuts into it, isn't gonna dull the blade.

I've also used a piece of hardboard as a backup on things like that as well.

So you could do that if you don't have the cutting mat.

I have my three main pieces for the tool roll all cut out.

You'll notice that this particular leather has a smooth side to it and a rough side.

How you want to arrange this is really up to you.

So I have it set up so that the back piece, the rough side is to the outside, and then the inner piece that will include the flap, again, has the rough side facing me.

Same thing with the smaller piece that goes on the front that will form the little pouches for the individual chisels.

What we want to do now is begin to hold these pieces together.

We're gonna use the stitching pony that Logan made earlier.

But before that I want to keep these parts from shifting around, and that requires some glue.

And I'll start with this front piece because the top edge of it gets folded over to make a nice rolled edge there.

To hold it in place, I've marked where that seam is gonna be, and I'm gonna use, uh, some contact cement.

I'll brush contact cement on here.

And the way it works is I need to allow it, until it's dry to the touch before I can then fold this top edge over.

And then at that point, as soon as those glued surfaces contact each other, they're gonna be held fast.

I'll roll it out to get a nice tight seam there.

The glue really only holds these pieces together so that when we do these other, more permanent steps, the parts aren't gonna slide around on you.

It's a really good idea, though you could skip the whole contact cement part of it.

The next step is to add some metal hardware.

What I want to do is put a rivet between each of the chisel pockets.

That's gonna keep those pockets from spreading apart and then starting to damage the sewn seams that we're gonna get to in a little bit.

The rivets that I'm gonna use come in two parts here.

There's a cap piece that will be on the top part, the exposed part of our rivet, and then coming through from the bottom side will be this stem piece here.

So the cap fits over the top... ...and then I'm going to use a rivet setting tool.

It consists of this anvil that has a variety of sizes to suit the size of your rivet.

So I'll basically just find whichever one looks right, fit that in place on the bottom side, and then I'm gonna use a rivet setting tool and a hammer to mushroom over that rivet part on the stem to press it down into the leather.

Now, the kit that I got has not only the anvil, but it has a variety of setting tools in different sizes to accommodate different sizes of rivets or grommets, even snaps, to be able to add to your leather projects.

It's a fun little set, and frankly, as woodworkers, we have a hard time avoiding getting a couple of new tools.

So here's a few ways to do that.

How I'm gonna do this is I'm gonna use an awl to mark the location of where each of those rivets are gonna be.

Tap that down a little bit, and then I'll use a drill bit to drill through the leather.

Want to take your time here.

Back up the bit with a piece of plywood or just a scrap, and then take it easy as you go through.

You don't want the leather to wrap around the drill bit and start climbing and tearing and pulling up on you.

From there, I'll just fit the cap into place, flip it over, add the stem piece, and then get my anvil and the setting tool and then tap it down.

Our next step is to add the stitching that will secure all three of these layers together.

What I've done is marked the perimeter location for the stitches here, and I've marked the locations for each of the pockets that I can just pencil in here.

We're going through three layers of leather here and two layers here.

That's just a lot of pushing if you're trying to just force the needles through.

Instead, I'm gonna create essentially pilot holes, to use a woodworking term here, for each one of the stitches.

There are several ways to go about it.

You can get a specialty leather tool that looks like this, has a wheel on it that has sharp lobes.

As I roll that along, applying some pressure, each one of those lobes will create an indentation where a stitch will occur.

Then I'll come back with a stitching awl, which is kind of a flattened awl, and I will then press or pound that awl through each one of those marked locations.

The option that I'm gonna go with is to use basically what looks like a pretty small and dangerous-looking fork, and I can align each one of the tines with that layout line, give it a tap with a hammer.

That creates pilot holes for a string of the stitches.

What I'll do next is index the first tine with the last hole, and then carry my way down the line.

It's a pretty fast way to create evenly spaced holes, especially with all the stitching that we're gonna do here.

It's time to bring in the stitching pony that Logan made.

So I have it clamped to the bench here, and I've clamped the tool roll in between the jaws.

I have the pockets for the chisels down on this side, and I'm gonna be working on the upper portion here.

I want to start at the seam where the chisel pockets start, working my way to the top, and then across the top to the other side.

For the actual stitching, I'm using a waxed thread that will help pull things together.

The wax does two things -- as it gets pulled through, the friction melts the wax, helps lubricate it to slide through, and then once it's in place, the wax resolidifies and then helps lock everything together and resists being pulled out from the normal wear and tear on the project.

We're using an approach called saddle stitching, where the thread that I have has a needle on each end of it.

The other thing is, I don't want the needle to pull off of the thread as we're going along here, so what I want to do is lock that in place.

To do that, I'm gonna untwist the thread here a little bit to create a gap that I can pass the tip of the needle into.

So I'm about midway through all the fibers in the thread.

Pull that through, and then it locks on to the tail of my -- that came through the thread, pulling it in place.

So as we go along, what I'm gonna do is pass the needle through to start, balance the thread on each end, and then the needles will go back and forth through each of the holes, weaving its way up here.

Helps lock the stitches in place as we go along.

Since I punched the holes on here, the needles are actually pretty dull.

You just want them to be able to slide through those holes relatively easy.

Taking a break here because, well, this can be work on your fingertips, so you want to take it easy.

The other thing is, is when you run out of thread or say the thread breaks on one of them and you need to pick back up, I reloaded my needles here with more thread.

And then rather than carrying on from that last point, I'm going to come back two or three stitches and start again as if I was just brand-new going over this.

Because now as I go back and forth through here, I'm gonna lock those previous stitches in place to my new run of thread, and then I can keep going on.

The thing, though, is that now there are basically already two pieces of thread going through that same hole, so it can be much more difficult to push the needles through.

So you'll want to grab, you know, like a sewing thimble to be able to help you push that through or even have some needle-nose pliers to be able to help you pull that through as you get there over these few threads until you start to get to that fresh area, then.

Well, here we are at the end of the line on this top section of the stitching.

What I want to do now is finish it off without leaving the possibility for this to unravel on us.

So what I'm gonna do is backstitch just two or three stitches.

I'm gonna come back up this line, kind of similar to what we did when we were splicing in a new section of thread.

I'll bring up those few stitches, and then what you want to do is cut it off as close as you can here, so you're not leaving a lot of extra thread that could snag and then begin to unravel.

The final bit of stitching that I took care of on the tool roll was stitching between the individual pouches on here.

For these, I started up at the top, just below the rivets and worked my way to the bottom, and then remembering to backstitch to lock those in place.

The final detail to add then, is to make a couple of slits on the flap on the side here, and then cut a long strap.

This will be used to secure the tool roll when everything's all rolled up in it.

Now, the leather will be a little rigid for a while.

It'll get flexible the more you roll up the tools in there, and even over time it's gonna develop its own fun patina on it.

There are a wide variety of leather protectants and sealants and colorants and things like that for it that you can get into, but I think the natural look of the leather and the way it'll wear in your shop will be just right.

♪♪ The best part about working with leather is that it can turn into its whole other hobby.

There's lots of other patterns and tools and techniques to go along with it.

Speaking of patterns, if you're ready to make a tool roll along with us, the plans are at our website, woodsmithshop.com.

Those plans include a few other woodworking accessories too that you can make from leather.

The site is also a great opportunity to expand your woodworking skills, find some new inspiration on projects, and then join us right back here for another great project in the Woodsmith Shop.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Announcer: If you'd like to get more video tips and techniques, sign up for the free weekly Woodsmith eTip.

Every week, you'll receive an e-mail with a video tip to get more out of your table saw, router table, and more.

Sign up at WoodsmithShop.com.

Everything in today's show comes from the newly expanded Woodsmith Guild Edition, with shop projects, plans, tips, and techniques.

To get a free preview issue of the Woodsmith Guild Edition and a free Woodsmith book, go to WoodsmithShop.com.

In addition, past seasons of "The Woodsmith Shop" are available on DVD.

Or you can watch them online from your computer, tablet, or mobile device.

For more information, go to WoodsmithShop.com.

Major funding for "The Woodsmith Shop" has been provided by... Old Masters.

Offering wood stains and finishes for the woodworking enthusiast and professional.

♪♪ And by... Kreg, tools designed by woodworkers for woodworkers.

Create what inspires you.

Additional funding provided by... ♪♪ Titebond wood glues, the pro's advantage.

♪♪ And by... ♪♪ ♪♪