let's cut some leather with a laser what's up i'm jonathan and welcome to maker tales where i'm
showing my makeup journey to help you go further in yours so don't forget subscribe and hit that
little bell icon to never miss an opportunity to keep making this video is all about playing around
with leather and seeing what i can make with it now first of all a little safety and disclaimer
thing so first of all the disclaimer is i have no idea what i'm doing with leather this is very much
an experimentation i want to tell you the results that i've got that have worked well for me if you
want to see a true leather craftsman youtube is filled with them and it really is amazing i
hopefully one day we'll get to a higher level than i am right now but take all the things
that i'm doing just with leather with a pinch of salt because i don't really know what i'm doing
but i got some decent results from what i have been exploring with when it comes to
safety make sure that you're using the right type of leather with a laser because leather
comes as pleather as fake leather chrome tan leather which is chemically tanned leather and
a vegetable tan leather which is leather that has been tanned using a natural process so no real
industrial chemicals are used because if you use things like chrome leather you're gonna
have chromium that gets exposed some chrome tan leathers especially the ones with color
do also have some trace amounts of chlorine so that can really screw up your laser or your health
and when it comes to the pleather they have pvc which quite frankly that's pure chlorine cutting
for your laser which if you don't like your laser that's what you do the next thing to do
with laser cutting after you know that it's safe to cut is finding the settings i spent
far too long trying to find the settings for leather because i forgot that leather isn't very
regular in the sense that it's between 1.2 and 1.6 millimeters the shoulder cut that i have
here and i was having real problems because i wanted to just get a beautifully clean cut
and i realized what i have to find here is the correct way to cut my leather the correct way
to kiss cut it and the correct way to engrave it separately and finding the correct processes
so i'm gonna show you now some processes of me cutting my leather to create some
awesome keyrings that i've been making here so i've got this one here and these here as well
now let's just go and show you how i made these so first of all when it comes to leather there is
the smooth side and this rough side this rough side is called the flesh side of leather
and i had no idea how to deal with this because i found that when i was cutting it it was getting
all frayed and horrible the edges weren't looking nicely sharp and cut so i after a little bit
of googling i found out that you've got to sort of mesh this backside back down i don't have
any of these fancy gums and things that you can put on the back but what i did have was beeswax
furniture polish and a glass bottle so that's what i did i put some beeswax furniture polish
on the back of my leather and i then used a glass bottle to really go ahead and push that in and
just merge all the back fibers together to create a consistent back now do keep in mind that while
you're doing this don't get any of the beeswax on the other side of the leather because that's going
to stain your leather anyway once you've done that to your leather you now have a really nice smooth
non non-fuzzy flesh side that can actually take on an engraving very nicely here's an example of the
flesh side engraving that comes out pretty nicely so with that done let's go ahead and chuck it into
the laser now what i do is i use some magnets to really stretch out my leather to keep it as flat
as possible i also check around if there's any bumps and if there is that's where i put a small
magnet to try and keep it down because my first pass is engraving now when it comes to engraving
i did a lot of testing here and i found that the best result was a super low power so i have my
glowforge which is a 45 watt laser at a 10 power at a speed of 1000 and a dpi of 256 and that there
gave me a nice clean engraving without too much smoke bleeding from the engraving itself and one
of the key problems with leather is smoke staining you're gonna find that if you have too high of
power when you're doing an engraving you're gonna get big smoke staining underneath and honestly
at that point it's pretty much in the bin because once you wet leather it just never is the same and
you can try using saddle soap and all the rest but i found me personally i couldn't get this to
be cleaned and i searched for hours trying to find a solution for this anyway next up let's go into
cutting the leather so when it came to cutting the leather after i've done my engraving pass i go and
put masking tape all over my leather making sure that it's really securely placed down and it's
as easy as that once it's placed down you then go ahead and cut it my cut settings are at 200 speed
and at 95 power to make sure that i get through the leather now once we've cut it here you'll see
so much smoke staining that comes from it now if you're wanting to do some engraving on the
backside of tags all you have to do at this point is now flip it use the leather that you have there
as a guide and don't move anything inside of your software and that there is my last leather pass
now of course at this point i just take my leather out and i go and do all my other cuts for all
these little wooden bits that i'll explain later on now with all my wooden things done i go ahead
into the workshop and i take all the masking tape off and i also sand down all the wooden bits here
are my leather straps pieces of wood and hardware ready to be put together as you can see
i've already created one version of each type of keyring here but what i really want to explore now
was staining the leather itself now i did try to stain the leather using some wood stains but
i wasn't really getting the result that i wanted so what i eventually went for is getting some eco
flow leather stain itself and i have to say i am really happy i did because it comes on so easily
and stains it so beautifully and if you want you can really go for it and it gets really
dark so you really have a lot of variety from one color so for this i pretty much just used a stick
a bit of kitchen towel dipped it lightly and then just went over it as quick as possible because if
you go too slowly or you put on too much it's going to get really stained really
dark lastly one other little project that i had was these little leather presses now
leather presses usually you have to use a big like press of tons of force whatever but what i
found is all i did was i laser engraved a reverse of what i'm wanting to press and then from there
i make sure that the positive is what's going to be the negative of here and then all i do is i
wet the leather with my finger just a little bit beforehand and then i go ahead i center and press
this engraving down i then just clamp it down for about five ten minutes and at that point i get a
lovely pressed piece of leather so from here i'm just gonna give you a lovely little montage of me
putting all these last bits and pieces together and then i'll show you what i came out with at the
end now just keep in mind that these little things here are called double cap rivets just in case
you're wanting them and everything that i'm using here is going to be linked down in the description
so by the end of all that i ended up with a whole bunch of key rings now
let's go talking through these simple tab keyring which is engraved on both sides
very nice and handy for labeling things we have the pressed leather which in all honesty is super
classy i do really like functional keyrings so we have the teeny tiny maker tails logo with one inch
on the bottom and three centimeters on the side so you always have a way of doing measurements and my
favorite one is the phone stand now i did try and do this through just a leather version but i have
to say i was not liking how this was coming out it felt like it was only going to last maybe a month
and then at that point it would never hold up a phone again so i tried to look up online how other
phone stands work and what you mainly see is a big bit of wood holding a phone so i was just
like how can i make a big bit of wood not big well spread it open and use the leather itself
as the joint so this here is my end result i have to say i am super happy about this
now if you've enjoyed my experimentation here i want to get a hold of some of these yourself
you can go over to my etsy where you can get the actual maker tails merch itself
or you can get just the files for you to be able to create whatever you want with them
a huge thank you to my patrons you guys are absolutely awesome and it means so much to me
and if you think i'm worthy of your support i would love to see you there too don't forget
that we have a discord channel now so that is down in the description join the conversation and see
what us makers are getting up to thank you for watching keep making and let the quest continue