Hardening Q & A

[Izanaki]

I had a question about hardening with water.

I know some people say that if you fill your bath tub with hot water and soak the leather for about 15 minutes it will harden, but could leave black stuff in your tub.

My questions are: What are the full steps of hardening with water both hot and cold, and could i put a liner in my tub, perhaps just garbage bags duct taped together so then black stuff wont ruin the tub?

Also, maybe if someone wants to post all their links to tutorials for armor hardening, maybe then this thread could be stickied for anyone to easily find.

[Xenoc]

I heard it can brown up your tub a little bit but that it can be cleaned off if you do it right when you finish. Is this true? and is it hard to clean or does it just wipe off?

[Spork]

Yeah, there is a thin layer of brown gunk in the tub. After it was done you might be able to wipe it off with a rag, if not just use some cleaner and it'll be off. Don't wait too long though (1+ hours), it can leave a might ugly ring.

For hardening, I used hot water and kept it in the tub till all the bubbles stopped coming off of the leather. During the soaking process just press on it and whatnot, you'll see some stuff coming out of it (the brown stuff, I think this is previous tanning liquids and stuff). After all this has occured, which is around an hour, you can take it out and it'll be extremely flexible.

This is the point where you do any forming that'd you like to see in your leather, then put it somewhere to dry. If you want it to conform to something, simply make a "model" of yourself to let it dry on. I used a leg of a chair with a small pillow to get something that looked like my calf. I made greaves.

I'm not that experienced in leatherworking, but the above process worked fine for me.

[Izanaki]

Thanks for the help, i dont recall who, but someone IM'd me this link last night and its pretty good.

http://www.houseofthewolf.com/bauzubandtutorial.html