suberic
Posts: 175
Joined: 1/9/2005
From: Nashville TN
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quote:
ORIGINAL: sfgrrl
Consider take some classes at your local Tandy Leather. They used to offer a series of basic leathercrafting classes that cost $75 or so and ran over several weekends. They showed you how to use the different tools and you made a few projects along the way. At the end, you got to spend the course fee on equipment and supplies. Not too shabby.
It was a great little introduction to leatherworking and if they still offer such classes, it would give you a decent starting point on which to grow your skills.
~stef
Actually, they're free. I think the ONLY cost is the leather, but I'm not really sure. I know the class is free, they have tools you can use, and I'm about 90% sure they give you the leather.
Learning this is not rocket science. The hard one is the tooling. Other than that, it's sewing with an awl, lacing, gluing and cutting leather straps.
My restraints are just a leather latigo belt, split so I have 1 1/4 wide strap, and a 3/4 inch strap. From there, attaching the buckle, riveting the two pieces together and adding the D-ring is a matter of moments. I can make a full set of restraints (collar, cuffs and shackles with locking buckles) in about 20 minutes. I use about 5 tools, two dozen rivets, five buckles and five D-rings.
I'll tell you a secret: I spend about $20 in materials and I sell them for $60. Making them for bigger people is simply a matter of adding inches on the leather strap, and the rest of it is just as easy. I don't tool them which is the time consuming part, although I can. I can dye them different colors, but brown is the standard color.
The skill set is not that hard. If you can cut with a sissors, measure, hit a cylindrical piece of metal with a hammer, and use a strap cutter (which ammounts to pushing a belt through a device that cuts with a razor blade, kind of like a draw knife), and if you have a creative mind to plan and design, you can do this.
Floggers are even easier, it's cutting a piece of leather in a large rectangle, cutting the tails, rolling it onto a dowel, gluing it all down, and that's about it.
Braiding can be complex, but there are books and most of the braids you may use are basically the same braid with more tails to braid. There is a book on whipmaking that I'm planning on getting, and making a 10 foot bullwhip.
Most of the knowledge is design oriented and which leather is good for what project. And that information is out there on the Internet.
Not really that hard. The tooling is the expensive and complex skill, since you need about two dozen punches and stamps, and the layout of the pictures for the leather is complex. But you don't need that skill at all to make your own restraints.
The initial OUTLAY for tools is expensive. First time I stepped into Tandy, just to get the BASIC sets I needed to do my job, it was $150. Every two weeks after that for the next four months was another $100 at least. That got me four full skins for my floggers and the restraints. Each belt strap cost $25 for JUST the strap. If you get lucky, you can get the sides of leather for floggers (and other items like gloves, hoods, blindfolds and so on) for somwhere around $90 to $150 per and you have to buy the full skin. It's charged out in square feet, and each side averages 15 square feet. Average prices for flogger weight leather is about $5.50 per square foot.
So the leather is the one outlay that is the most expensive. But out of that, 15 square feet will translate into about 5 or 6 floggers, and you can get an entire set of restraints from one belt with a bit left over.
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