Love your work.

Robert Taylor

He also does a great demo.  Made this poker yesterday following a demo he gave on split (no weld) basket handles.

Latticino.. Nice work..   Not to come on to this wonderful thread..  Starting up a Basket twist poker challenge. 

Latticino, very nice!

Jennifer, I have to find my little GoPro for filming... It's around here.... Somewhere....

Made a belt buckle a la Torbjörn Åhman (aka Tubbe here on IFI). Now I just have to make the belt...

Very nice work..  its so awesome seeing how you have grown as a smith..  Fantastic. 

That looks Pretty sweet Frazer! 

  I agree, that's a handsome buckle Frazer.  I was just thinking how good it would look on my Filson belt... 

Looks good Frazer, well done.

Frosty The Lucky.

Going to make a chain maille belt?

For leather items cruise on over to Leatherworker.net. They are the IFI of leather. Great people that are willing to share their knowledge.  I have referred IFI on there as well for those who work leather and were getting into metal as well.

All of your items are very clean forgings, I like that.  Forged items don't need to have hammer marks in them.

Truoil does hold up, we used it on gunstocks.  We used acetone to wipe it down after sanding to clean the pores out, as it does not raise the grain like water does. Apply a coat, then we would hang it in a small sealed dust free cabinet to dry in between coats. Scuff each coat to smooth it out before the next coat went on.  

I wonder how applying vacuum with the oil turp mix would turn out.  It may help it penetrate deeper.  Build a vacuum chamber, have a container inside with the scales and oil mix to cover them. Pull a vacuum and let sit for awhile.  I have a few air conditioning vacuum pumps that I could try this with.  To test, you could put a test piece in, oil it the way you usually do, and another with vacuum.  Cut both in half and look to see how far each penetrated. 

Nodebt, it's a pretty easy little project. I used 3/8" for the frame, 5/16" for the bar and a little cutoff of spring steel for the prong. The buckle is sized for a 1.5" belt.

People are now asking me for them so I'm running through variations of the design in my mind.. I don't particularly like selling things that are (more or less) direct copies of things I find on YT.

This is one project where ~15 minutes with a file makes a big difference to the final product.

I like the way the forge braze ran out a little on one side. If I could make that a little more purposeful it could be an interesting touch.

TP, ha, no. Maybe one of the belts the mall ninjas have with the black and neon green spikes coming out the sides? Studs perhaps? No... John has enough on his plate (that's an old reference).

Biggun thanks for the tip! My leatherwork skills leave something to be desired. My sheaths have gotten better over time, but I really only do the one style. Glad to hear truoil holds up. So far I have enjoyed using it. I have a vacuum chamber that I use to stabilize all my wood. I'll have to give it a try with the finishes are share the results.

As for hammer marks, I like the clean look as well. It's another area where taking the extra couple of minutes to brush often and planish makes a big difference to perceived quality. If I want texture, I use a texturing hammer or something that creates a more uniform hammered look. Of course folks have different tastes; I don't judge.

Historically hammer marks were an indication that the job was done by an unskilled smith; or the job was so quick and dirty and cheap that it wasn't worth doing "good work".  There were even separate guilds for armor polishers---see the Nuremburg HausBucher;  The hammer texture we see today is pretty much an offshoot of the Arts & Crafts Movement of around 1900.  They held that Humans had sold their souls to the artificial perfection of machine made goods and to gain back our souls people needed to do things themselves and leave in the imperfections to show it was "handmade"!  (Took about a week till there were machines putting in "fake" hammer marks---you can still see them sometimes on Garden gate hardware where random marks looking like a drunken monkey with a ball peen was used to provide "artistic dents")

This was not only in smithing; slubby yarns were also spun to show they were handmade----we see this in reenactment at times and have to tell them that a 9 year old would have been whipped for spinning so poorly in medieval times where slubby yarns were hated as they did not weave well and did not wear well---when a set of Saxon trews took 7 miles of handspun you don't want them to wear out *fast*!

I have a book somewhere that shows forged belt buckles.  What he did was make jaws for the vise that had two holes for the belt loop.  He made a flat bottom U that came up through the holes and were gripped by the vise jaws with the holes in them.  Then he would bend and forge the buckle on the jaw inserts. When done, he opened the vise to release the buckle.  Brass, copper, bronze, aluminum, etc would work better for this as it is malleable when cold, but steel could be done as well.

I finished up 2 belts. Not too shabby all things considered. I started with 1.5" wide, 9-10oz strips (also seen in pictures). Overall a good learning experience.

I had to make a few leather working tools as well. A kiridashi (sort of) made from 1095 (gun blued for fun). And a half moon knife made from an old saw blade. Stabilized spalted maple handle. 

I really like the handle treatment around the saw arbor hole on the head knife. The Kiridashi is very nice and one of the handiest knives to have.

Knives look awesome Frazer! 

im still hung up on the buckles, I think I wanna give that a go myself! 

Very nice work.. Your work speaks volumes to attention..  

Nice attention to detail. Thanks for sharing.

  The leatherwork really compliments those buckles.  Frazer, what is the half moon knife used for?

General cutting, cutting curves (by rocking the blade) and using push strokes to shave down the leather. You shave down the thickness so in areas where two layers overlap (i.e. the belt loop; and the underside of the belt, buckle-side, where the D shaped stitches are) you have a gradual change in thickness rather than a sudden drop off.

That's called skiving in leather craft.

It's funny, I almost wrote, "like a scarf for leather". After a quick search one of the synonyms for skiving is scarfing!

Thank you for the term!

Both "scarf" (in the sense of tapering a piece to be joined, especially wood in a nautical context) and "skive" appear to come ultimately from one of a number of Germanic/Scandinavian roots meaning "slice". Their specific linguistic relationship is, alas, unclear.

The head knife looks good. How well does the saw blade take and hold an edge? I have some , and they are generally fairly thin to make slicing the leather easier.

The buckles look good on the belts.