On Mar 13, 2009, at 10:53 AM, Kidwell, Ted W wrote: > Thanks for the input. I’ll have to try this. I had seen this > technique in a Journal article a year or so ago but it looked time > consuming. If you say it is as fast as, and better than bolstering > I’ll have to give it a try. > > One more question- do you treat the felt under the leather in any > way before regluing? Well, in my experience it was easier than it seemed it would be. Knuckles vary, and actually cutting loose one side of a knuckle leather can vary from simple to touchy. It depends where the glue is. Sometimes there is quite a bit between the leather and the felt, so you need to break that loose by running something like a small screwdriver blade between those materials first. And sometimes there is quite a bit of glue squeeze out from putting the core into the slot in the shank, so there is glue between the leather and the shank. A sharp chisel is best for that. The actual glue joint between the leather and the core is usually a piece of cake, but the other areas can make it a little challenging. Then it is a matter of dabbing some glue, stretching the leather, and clamping, using the clamp to help stretch the leather (grab and pull). I haven't ever done anything to the felt core. I'm not sure what you _could_ do that would make a difference. It is usually a round cutout with a slot for the core, and would be hard to match or to adjust. In any case, stretching the leather around it makes for a much better round profile. And tight leather works a lot better than sloppy leather for the feel of the action. My memory is a little vague - it's been a while since I did this kind of job - but I'm thinking it took well less than 2 hours, closer to 1, on average. Less than one hour if things go particularly smoothly. It's a good plan to practice on some "archived used parts" to build up technique. For efficiency, it is best to cut loose all (or a section) first, then glue all. Regards, Fred Sturm University of New Mexico fssturm at unm.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut_ptg.org/attachments/20090313/aea2be4d/attachment.html>
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