2019 Catalog

springfieldleather.com

A Brief Introduction to Leather Leather can be tough to navigate. That’s why we’ve compiled some of the best bits of knowledge we could come up with and put them in this section. We’ll teach you some leather terms, help you with cuts and weight and will give you some of his best know-how when it comes to buying leath- er. Flip to page [[INSERT PAGE]] to start shopping. If you have more questions, please visit our website’s FAQ page or our blog, Kevin’s Storytime at SpringfieldLeather.tk. Tanning and Finishes Leather is produced by using animal skins in a process called tanning. Leather tanning varies in method and results in a skin that comes in various finishes. There are a few types of tanning, but we’ll discuss the two most prominently practiced: vegetable tanning and chrome tanning. Vegetable Tanning A method of hide tanning which utilizes materials from organic materials such as bark tannins. Vegetable tanned leather takes longer to produce and has greater body and firmness than chrome tanned leather. A lot of vegetable tanned leather is able to be tooled - but not all. Look for natural veg tan or look for terms like “tooling leather” if you want to carve your leather. Chrome Tanning A method of tanning leather in which chromium salts are used. Chrome Tanned leathers are often softer, more mellow and pliable than vegetable tanned leathers. This method of tanning is faster than vegetable tanning. Grading Vegetable tanned leather is often left in its natural state and therefore can’t rely on coloring, decoration or other alterations that can hide skin imperfections. So, tanneries grade their leather to let customers know which leather has the fewest cosmitic issues in the tannery at the time. To read a more comprehensive breakdown, visit the blog: bit.ly/leathergrade The bottom line is that the grader is primarily concerned with cosmetic issues. The grader obviously cannot see into the leather. He also is not going to wet a spot on the side, make a few cuts with a swivel knife, then bevel a little to see how it cuts or tools. Those things are not able to be detected by the tanner, or by us.

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Some tanners use A, B, C, D, 1, 2, 3, 4 to denote grades. At SLC, we use a grading system that places “A” at the top of the quality scale as letter grading generally matches up to tannery grading systems like Hermann Oak. Lower grade sides will have more of those cosmetic issues we mentioned and higher grades will have less, but the leather itself is all the same quality. The tanner will get maybe 5-10 “A” grade hides out of 100. Maybe 20 or so “B” grades. The rest will be “C”s, and “D”s.

Something that most crafters are not aware of, is that to a tanner, an “A” grade side is simply the best grade of leather that is in the tannery at the moment. That’s why you can still find an occasional defect on an “A” grade side. So, if you order 50 sides of “A” grade from a tanner, you’ll get the best 50 that he has, even though some could have been “B”s in another run.

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