Things I Love this Week: Feb 21-27, 2021

Since I posted about buying the best tools you can afford, I want to share one of my "tool-buying mistakes" to hopefully save you some heartache.

Skiving. For a long time, I hated it. I wasn't good at it. I really want to invest in an electric skiving machine, but promised myself that I had to make a certain number of sales before I bought one. Also...I don't really have the space in my workshop, since my workshop also doubles as my gaming office AND my work-from-home 9-5 job office.

I tried a safety beveler and a super skiver. I even got one of those manual skiving "machines" that you attach to your bench and fit with razor blades. My husband got me a round knife for my birthday one year, and I just couldn't master it for skiving work. I'd either not skive enough off, or I'd go too deep and nick the end of the leather, making it likely to rip. Nothing was giving me the results I wanted...which was why I looked into electric skiving machines in the first place.

Between my searches for "How to skive leather" and "how to sharpen leatherworking tools" I came across this video: "Stropping a Cheap Skiving Knife to Super Sharp." It answered one question about sharpening tools, and he said that the cheap knife was actually pretty good, so I went ahead and ordered one.

I tried skiving with it and...my first attempts were total disasters. For a while, I went back to trying to make the other skivers work. Then I saw other videos where people were using these skiving knives, so I decided to give it another try. So I looked for videos specifically about skiving with a knife.

This video, "Leather Skiving Demystified" was exactly the video I needed to see. Around 6:30 he said he was using some 4oz. "Designer leather" (Chrome tan) and couldn't get a good skive with the other tools..."Same as me!" And he had the same skiving knife that I had gotten.

Seeing how to use it suddenly made sense, and it's become my favorite hand tool.

I have since purchased an oblique blade skiving knife because the curve of the blade matches my wrist motion better, and I use both knives depending on what I need to do. But for skiving work, it's a slight matter of preference.

This is one tool where I feel you can start with a cheaper knife since you may use it later for just cutting your leather, but save your money on the various bevelers and other skiving tools. It may take a little longer to skive your leather with this knife, but the results are definitely worth the extra time.