[Captions by Mary V. at Y Translator]
That works.
Show us how it's really done.
All right, Garrett. That was awesome.
Tell us about this whip you were using.
>> Yeah. So this is a six and half foot kangaroo hide bullwhip,
and it has a shot loaded core with a four plait belly,
cowhide bolster and a 12 plait overlay,
and we're gonna be making that today.
>> All right. I don't know what most of those things mean
but it sounds cool and we're gonna learn about it.
And so this kangaroo leather whip is made from this kangaroo leather strips.
Among some other things right ? >> Exactly.
>> How do we get to this from a kangaroo hide?
>> Yeah.
So, the biggest kangaroo hide you ever gonna find is gonna be about this big.
So that obviously is not gonna get very long thin strips.
So we have to cut circles around the circumference of the kangaroo hide
in order to get the length of leather lace that we need.
In order to do that,
we make a lace cutter, which makes it easy to cut the leather laces.
>> All right, very cool.
So we're going to spiral cut a kangaroo hide,
and what we need to do is build the little mechanism that lets us do that.
>> Exactly.
>> Very cool.
Here's the basic idea.
We're going to take a piece of scrap wood,
a couple of razor blades and some hardware
to assemble an adjustable lace cutter
used for making strips of leather that can then be woven into a leather bullwhip.
To get started on our lace cutter, what are the supplies that we need?
>> We're gonna need just a piece of scrap wood,
some razor blades in order to actually cut the leather,
some wing nuts and some washers to kind of hold the entire apparatus together,
and we're gonna need some threaded rod.
>> To start out, we need to cut a couple of pieces out of our board,
and to decide the size of that,
we're just gonna figure out what seems like it'll be easy to hold on to.
Let's see so...
>> Yeah, to fit easily in my hand, give me a good grip.
Do a little over 2 inches wide, or go for about two and a quarter,
and then let's go for maybe five and half.
[Music]
And then the second piece that we need to cut
is actually going to sit on top of this one,
and I think we're gonna try and make that length the same as this one's width.
So we're just gonna keep that cut going for-- I don't know,
about inch and a quarter-- inch and half something like that.
It's it's pretty loose.
And then we just need it wide enough that we can fit our washer on top of it.
Okay we got briefly distracted by a sudden and fairly intense hailstorm
so I might still be a little bit wet 'cause I felt I needed to run around in that.
>> Worth it!
>> But we're back and it's time to continue with our build.
So we've got our pieces measured out,
and we're gonna cut those out using a band saw.
If you don't have a band saw,
any other kind of saw will work pretty well.
It's just convenient for what we're doing.
[Music]
So at this point we've got our two pieces and...
Let me know if I've got this right.
The idea of how this is going to work.
So we're planning to put all thread right here.
The blade is gonna come up somewhere around right here, probably?
In our block? >> Yeah, about that, yeah.
And then our smaller block is going to have sort of ellipse shaped hole cut into it.
That's gonna be a sloppy drawing.
But that whole be cut out, and it will fit around the all thread.
So the all thread will go right here through this block,
and it'll be able to slide back and forth
until we fix it down in place with the wing nut.
So we've got 5/16 inch threaded rod,
and what we want is for that rod to be in this block super tight
so it's never gonna come out.
So we're gonna drill our hole using an even smaller drill bit.
This is a 1 quarter inch drill bit.
1/4 is 4/16, the rod is 5/16,
that makes the rod a tiny bit larger than the drill bit.
So it should be in there really tight.
So we need to drill a hole into the block right here,
and we need to drill a hole in the block right here.
[Music]
So it'll hold our razor blade in place.
We're gonna cut a slit down through part of this block.
We're not gonna go all the way down.
We're not removing a piece, but we're just making a slot
that our razor blade can fit into.
We've got our band saw and we've got this jig setup
that will hopefully let us cut perfectly straight into our block.
Now, we don't want to cut the whole piece all the way off.
How far down?
>> About--
>> Like that, you think? >> Yeah.
Yeah.
A little over twice as much as the distance right there.
[Music]
This mark was my first estimate of where to go.
Garrett suggested we go a little bit farther than that
because this is basically our hinge.
It's gonna be tightening down right where we drilled our hole,
and the razor blade is gonna be secured above that.
So if we've got a little bit more space,
we've got a little bit more leverage against our hinge,
and we can clamp it down nice and really tight.
Now at this point if we put our all thread into this hole that we've drilled,
it would be really stuck and we wouldn't really be able to squeeze this down
to pinch our razor blade, would we? >> No.
>> Okay. So we'll use a 5/16 inch drill bit to open up this front portion of the hole
so that we can clamp down on the razor blade,
and then it will move freely on the all thread rather than being locked onto it.
So you can't see too well inside this hole to know what's going on.
But here's the basic idea.
We drilled a hole that goes all the way down through the block,
about like that.
It's 1/4 of an inch wide.
But because we don't want the all thread to bind on this part,
we then drilled a larger hole that goes wider than that one quarter.
This is our 5/16 inch hole.
So we have a wider hole through this portion,
and then it narrows down to 1/4 inch for this portion.
This means the all thread should bind really well to the wood here.
But float in the drill hole on this portion up here.
It won't be attached to it,
which is good because we need this to move just slightly in and out.
So now this piece we need to drill this long, oval-shaped hole sort of thing.
And once again this is something we don't want to bind to the all thread.
We want it to be able to float and slide back and forth.
So, let's keep using the 5/16 inch drill bit for this,
and what we're just gonna do is set up a sort of brace,
and then we're just gonna drill holes down in sequence
making sort of a tunnel through the wood,
and we'll clean it up with a file if we need to.
[Music]
All right we've got that hole cut out.
It seems to slide pretty nicely on our all thread without--
It doesn't have a ton of wiggle room it just, it moves pretty easily.
Now we need some all thread.
We need all thread cut to fit into this hole and into that one.
All right we can take our drill bit that fits down into the hole.
We can measure,
see if if we do it through the block,
we can see it should come to here to be level.
Let's add on about half an inch to it.
So we can just measure like that about how long we want this to go.
[Music]
>> So I like to just put a little bit of superglue inside the hole.
That just helps to lock it in place even more.
>> Extra binding, sounds like a plan.
All right, so it can take a little bit of effort
to get that hole to bind onto the edge of the all thread,
but just push harder.
And you're gonna wanna use some pliers to grab onto the all thread,
and just twist it onto the wood.
My arm's getting tired.
>> Want me to take a turn?
>> Yeah.
I'm so strong.
>> See now. Someone else is doing the work.
That's the key.
[Music]
Probably getting near the bottom there.
[Music]
All right.
Now we can slide this back and forth.
And cinch it down using our all thread and the wing nut.
And it stays firmly in place.
Brilliant!
Same thing on the other side.
[Music]
So now we've got two adjustable points.
We can loosen and tighten this piece of the wood,
and then when we loosen this,
our little block on the top just slides back and forth.
What do we still need to do?
>> We need to put a blade in it.
>> I usually like to use about an inch of blade.
So it has enough to nicely grip inside the--
>> So I've got too much here?
>> Yes.
So we need to break off?
That's what's nice about these blades is you can break them off to
whatever size you want.
>> All right.
>> Sometimes razor blades go flying.
>> Got our blade and we wanna drop this down until most of it is hidden.
We only want like a little bit kind of sticking up the top.
It's maybe a quarter of an inch.
Maybe just over that, right?
>> Yeah, the longest [inaudible].
>> All right, and now we just twist here on the side,
and that will pinch down on the blade holding it firmly in place.
We can adjust how thick we want our lace cutter to cut
by moving this piece in and out.
Garrett, is there anything else we want to do to this,
to really make it work just right?
>> So there's one more optional thing that we can do.
We can take off this corner here.
Because as the leather is running by the lace cutter,
sometimes it gets caught on this corner.
So if we just cut this corner off at a 45 degree angle,
it'll help to cut the leather a little smoother.
[Music]
Cool. >> Looks beautiful.
>> Can we test it out?
>> Yep. Time to test it out.
>> Let's test it out.
Why are we using Kangaroo hide for our whip making?
>> Kangaroo hide is the strongest leather in existence.
There is basically no other leather that's gonna be stronger than kangaroo hide.
Okay so we're gonna be cutting around the circumference of the hide.
But as you can see, it doesn't have a very very smooth outline around the hide.
So we're gonna need to do is trim it.
So we have a very smooth curvature around the entire hide.
Which makes it easy to cut the lace.
>> These little points, if we tried to pass that through our lace cutter,
we can't really turn a sharp angle.
We just need it to be like a smooth transition.
So we're going to lose these little pointy bits on the edges.
>> I'm taking off these legs because the legs are usually pretty stretchy,
and it's not the optimal leather to use.
[Music]
Do we want to try and get any lace off of this piece you just cut?
Or do we want to go straight into the circle?
>> We need to-- we want to keep these scraps
because we'll use them for a little kind of rinky-dink things along the way,
but uh we're not gonna... >> So don't throw this away,
but don't use it right now.
>> Yeah so we're not gonna get very good lace out of that
but we can still get some good use out of it.
>> Okay.
>> Okay so now that we have the kangaroo hide trimmed up,
we have a very nice curve around the entire kangaroo hide.
We can now begin to cut the lace.
I like to cut lace on the corner of like a table or a work bench
or something like that.
So I have the kangaroo hide well braced on the table,
but I can have the edge of I'm working with free,
and I don't have a table on my way.
So to start cutting, we're just gonna start on an edge here,
and we're gonna take our blade,
and just kind of slowly push it in.
And we're gonna start just kind of a little bit of a taper,
and get wider and wider and wider
until we reach the full width that we've had it set to.
So right there.
Now as we start cutting,
it's really important to be holding the lace that you're pulling through,
and pulling at a little bit of an angle.
Pulling at an angle helps to keep tension on the lace cutter and the blade
so you get a more straight cut.
You have to be careful with fresh blades
because they cut through the leather like butter,
and if you get excited,
you'll just pull right through the leather in
and end your strand too early.
Wanna give a try?
>> Sure!
I like to put my thumb kind of on top to help keep it flush.
[Music]
Do I do anything special when I get back to the starting point,
or do I just kind of keep circling through?
>> Yeah, just kind of keep circling through.
That kind of notch will get taken away when you resize the strand.
>> So it feels like I could go a lot faster,
and you're recommending I really don't do that
because I'll probably end up accidentally just pulling the blade
right through the edge of the leather.
>> Yeah.
It actually kind of gets a little bit easier as the blade dulls just a little bit,
and you get a little bit of resistance.
That makes it easier to go a little bit faster
without worrying about cutting through your strand.
It's better to err on the side of cutting a little bit too thick.
Because we can make it smaller.
We can't make it bigger.
>> Okay I think I made it all the way around once.
Very cool. Very cool.
This lace cutter seems like it is working really well.
It's gliding through this leather super nicely,
and it's pretty easy to keep a uniform width on it,
and that is something that is going to be very important
as we try and turn this lace into a functional whip.
In our next video, Garrett's gonna be showing us
how to turn this leather lace into a fully functional whip.
So make sure you come back for that.
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