Monthly Archives: July 2014

Uncategorized

Finished My First Pair of Chinks

My first pair of chinks
My first pair of chinks

Today I finished my first pair of chinks. Of the three pairs of chaps I’ve made (batwings, Arizona shotguns, and these), these were the most complicated. However, my skills and knowledge have improved a little and I have bought a few more tools, so there were no real difficulties.

These are from Bob Klenda‘s Red Rock Chink patterns. The patterns are sufficiently detailed for a beginner (I fall into that category), however I ran into a few minor details where a little more information, or some prior experience and knowledge would have helped. I’ll get to that in a minute. These chinks have three leg straps on each side with 5/8″ brass buckles, making for good adjustability for leg size. The back belt is solid, so the chinks are adjusted for waist size by the 1/2″ front belt.

As with the other two pairs of chaps, the leather is 5/6 oz oil-tanned chap leather I purchased online from The Leather Guy. I have been happy with all three sides of leather I have bought through this outlet. Much of what they sell is blemished in some way, and is therefore considered #2 quality, however he provides excellent photos of each piece of leather and provides detailed descriptions. You purchase the piece in the pictures. All three sides I have bought were exactly as described. I have been very pleased, not only with the leather, but also with the service, prices, and shipping costs.

I began as I did with the other two pairs of chaps, by laying out the pattern on top of the leather and tracing around it with a #5 overstitch wheel. The overstitch wheel marks the leather sufficiently to transfer the pattern lines to the leather without cutting the pattern, so the pattern is preserved. After that, I cut out the first legging. I then used the first legging as a pattern to mark the second legging, by tracing around it with the tip of a stylus or awl. Make sure you cut both a left and right leg!

I made the yokes and shields for the conchos out of 7/8 oz tooling leather, onto which I stamped a basket pattern. I seem to be getting a little better at stamping and I am pleased with the way they came out. I stamped the same pattern on the belt as well. The leg shields, where the legging buckles attach is made of chap leather, stitched into place.

2014-07-17 21.14.21After stitching everything together I cut the rivet holes and oblong holes for the concho strings. The conchos are held in place with the traditional “bleed knots”, however, per the plans, the buckle straps on the back side are fixed in place with a rivet that runs through the strap, the concho string, and the tooled shield on the front. The rivet is covered by the concho. I like the way Bob designed this. It makes for a very durable pair of chinks that are very adjustable in leg size. Having said that, I didn’t assemble the straps and conchos until after I cut the fringe.

I marked out on the face of the chinks, freehand, where I thought the fringe line should be, with white chalk. The plans call for 5″ fringe, but mine worked out to 6″. Next, I marked guide lines to help me keep the fringe cut at the proper angle, as I worked around the pattern. I hung the chap on my leg, to see how it would hang, then marked the lowest point (the knee) so that the lace at that point would hang straight down when I was standing. Then I marked guide lines up each side, gradually changing the angle to make things look right.

The preferred method of cutting fringe, according to several leather workers on Leatherworker.net , is to use a round cutting wheel, such as are sold in fabric stores, however, some use the traditional round knife, and others use utility knives with polished blades. Whatever you choose, make sure it is razor sharp. As one fellow apptly put it, “It could cut you if you looked at it wrong.” I found I could not keep the leather from moving when I tried cutting from the inside toward the edge with a utility knife. The very end would move causing the end of the fringe to cut poorly. After several tries with the utility knife and an exacto knife, I tried my round knife. I found that by cutting from the edge toward the middle, with a steel ruler as a guide, I was able to cut straight fringes. It took a little practice to do it smoothly, though. I was very careful not to let the knife blade skip and gouge the legging. Occasionally, the round knife would not cut all the way through on parts of the fringe, so I finished those cuts with a utility knife.

I found that by cutting small wedges out of the fringe every few inches, starting about 1/4″ wide, or smaller, on the outer edge and tapering to nothing at the inside fringe line, I could keep the proper angles of the fringe, according to the guidelines I had chalked on the chap legging as I cut around the pattern. As the fringe is fairly limp, these wedges never show up and one cannot detect, even on close inspection, where they were removed. After the fringe was cut, I assembled the leg straps and conchos, as mentioned above.

2014-07-17 21.12.24For the front belt, instructions on the pattern called for the belt to be made of 9″ of 1/2″ chap leather, doubled and sewn to make each side of the belt. This is then riveted in place through a slot in the yoke. I made my belt of 7/8 oz tooling leather, as I didn’t want to have to try hand-stitching that 1/2″ wide belt strap.

For the back belt, I went with Bob’s suggestion of lacing it in place. I have seen other designs that cut the belt as an integral part of the yoke, and then lace it together in back, but Bob’s design uses less leather and allows you to cut the belt to size, and replace it in the eventuality of a change in waist size…as sometimes happens. This back belt is what determines the waist size of the chinks. Instructions for determining the proper length is provided on the pattern.

Herein is the part where a couple notes on the plans might help a rank novice like myself. Bob suggests 1/4″ or 3/8″ lacing. Since my backbelt is 1-1/2″ wide, I decided to go with the 3/8″ lacing. Bob provides a pattern for the lacing holes, with the proper spacing for each size lace. I have never laced anything before, so when I eyeballed this part, and started to think ahead on it, I quickly realized that I had no idea what size holes I needed to punch. After a little trial and error, I just decided that a number 5 worked for the edges and 4 for the middle holes. I tried making lace out of chap leather, but they looked terrible. Chap leather simply is not strong enough to skive to a thinness that looks right. Not having a clue as to what kind of leather I should use, I finally called Bob and asked him.

That’s something I really like about Bob Klenda. I have called him on several occasions and each time it is Bob who answers the phone. He is very pleasant and always willing to take the time to answer all my questions. Never has he seemed to be in a hurry, or impatient, or made an excuse to get off the phone. I have truly enjoyed the short conversations I have had with him, and I appreciate the help he has offered to assist me in making my chaps.

Anyway, Bob told me he makes his lace out of 7/8 oz latigo, which he cuts to width and splits to about 3 oz thickness. He then bevels the edges. As I don’t have a splitter, I asked whether he might consider making up a pair of laces for me and mailing them out. He was willing to do so, but about that time I realized I had recently ordered some latigo saddle strings from Sheridan Leather. I had them sitting in my shop. I decided to try splitting them the old fashioned way, with a knife. I thanked Bob for his help and let him get back to making his high-dollar custom saddles.

2014-07-17 21.14.31I took a saddle string and ran it through my Australian lace cutter, set at 3/8″ width. Then I used a wood chisel to gouge out a groove in a piece of 1X4 poplar I had lying around. The groove was about 1/2″ wide and about as close as I could come in depth to the thickness of 3 oz leather. I held the edge of my round knife on top of the board over the groove, and had my daughter help keep the lace taught as I pulled it through the groove under the knife edge, effectively and fairly accurately skiving off about half the thickness of the latigo lace.  The grain side of the lace must be down against the wood when this is done. I then polished the edge of an exacto knife on my strop board and stuck the point of it in my worktop at about a 45 degree angle. Using my thumb to guide the lace, I pulled it past the blade edge and beveled each edge on the flesh side. This is the way it was done before the advent of the lace cutters/bevelers we have available today (the Aussie lace cutter does not bevel).  These homemade laces worked like a charm and I am very pleased with the way the lace finished off the design. If I were to change anything, I might have used larger holes for the lacing, maybe #5 and #6 holes.

I finished the tooled leather off with several applications of 100% pure neatsfoot oil, followed by a coat of Sheridan’s RTC Resist and Finish. After letting the finish dry, I applied some Sheridan Brown Antique Finish. I let that set a while and buffed the excess off with a paper towel. I applied a finish coat of the RTC over that. Be careful not to get any of the dye or finish on the chap leather.

So, I have finished my first pair of chinks.

This pair of chinks will go to my dad, from whom I inherited the love of horses and horsemanship. They are a belated gift for his 80th birthday.

Happy Birthday, Dad, from a grateful son.

 

Book Reviews, Good Stories

Book Review: Dakota Cowboy, My Life in the Old Days, by Ike Blasingame

 Dakota Cowboy bookcoverI just finished reading for the second time one of the most enjoyable books I have ever found about the life of a cowboy back in “the good ol’ days”. Dakota Cowboy, My Life in the Old Days, by Ike blasingame, is a non-fiction documentary of Ike’s own life as a bronc buster and rough-string rider for the Matador Land and Cattle Company from 1904 to around 1912. The setting is in South Dakota, where Matador and several other major cattle concerns had set up huge ranching operations on lands leased from the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Indian Reservations, through cooperation between the Indian Tribes and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Ike takes us through all aspects of ranch operations, the lives of cowboys, their bosses, their horses, the land, and the cattle that gave them their livelihood.

I found myself completely engrossed in Blasingame’s way of describing and explaining things from a cowboy’s perspective, providing a window to the past, framed in cowboy common sense and frankness, that is largely closed nowadays, in our time of extreme opinions and political correctness. I learned the origins of some of the idiomatic expressions we use today, but think little of.

For instance, we’ve all heard the expression, “That really chaps my hide!” Take a minute and read Ike’s delivery of how a cowboy’s hide got “chapped”.

“Cowboys made a worthy attempt to be manly, to act in accordance with what was right, no matter their surroundings – mud, wind, rain, heat, or fine summer sunshine. There was little rough talk, other than simple swearing which seemed more a part of that way of life than disrespect and offensiveness. Obscenity was frowned upon. Any indecent act was met with stern disapproval. Improper talk about women or lewd jokes had little part in the regular everyday busy life these men lived. And the man who persisted in overstepping these rules was punished, not by arrest or by going to jail, but by the cowboys’ law which governed such breaches of decency and order.

If a man didn’t believe his ideas and deportment could be changed, it took but one or two trips to a good-sized bedroll over which he found himself stretched so that the seat of his britches were good and tight. A pair of heavy leather chaps held by the belt and wielded by a big-fisted cowpuncher in a way which brought the bottom of the leggings smartly down across the offender’s posterior a dozen times usually corrected any such false ideas. To be offensive enough to be “chapped” was a painful experience that no one relished.”

Reading about the sheer size of many of the old ranches was fascinating to me. For instance, according to Blasingame, Matador’s range lease on the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River reservations comprised about forty-eight square miles. In addition, outside the reservation Matador and several other large operations shared, by gentleman’s agreement, the free range to the west of the reservation boundaries.  Matador also held a sizable range lease north of the Canadian border. In its heyday, the Matador ran nearly sixty thousand head of cattle.

Despite the size of the Matador cattle operation, Blasingame keeps things simple by taking us with him through his daily tasks of breaking broncs, hunting wolves, managing and rounding up cattle, and moving them across the Missouri river to Evarts, South Dakota for shipment to market by train. He describes operations of the range wagons (the true home of the cowboy), the various levels of management and the divisions of their respective duties, as well as the daily chores expected of each cowboy.

I particularly enjoyed Blasingame’s chapter on horses. He talked about the “rough string” and why these horses were under his particular care. He spoke affectionately about those horses that worked as hard as he did, and somewhat critically of those that had to be “watched” all the time, so as to head them off when they got ornery. It was interesting to me how Blasingame would give each horse its due credit and praise for the work it could perform well, despite its ill temper or how difficult it was to ride. Take this excerpt from the chapter on The Rough Broncs:

“Spokane had a reputation as a hard-bucking horse. He was a slim blood-bay, weighing 1050 pounds. He had good shoulders, high hips, and was probably a good deal thoroughbred. He had been handled some and didn’t fight saddling; in fact, if a man could ride him until he had his buck over with, he worked willingly. But there was the pinch! Spokane saved himself for furious, hell-to-set pitching after a rider mounted. It was sport for him, and he had thrown more cowboys than had ever ridden him farther than three jumps. Spokane’s reputation followed him when Dode shipped him to South Dakota and came north himself as manager. Dode liked the horse.

“I want to see what our South Dakota bronc rider can make of him,” he said, preparing to leave Texas, and from the time that Spokane snorted down the chute, filled his belly and ran free a few weeks on rich grass, he was primed to jar the gutfat off the best of riders. He was one of the really snaky ones to come to the Dakota outfit.

Brown knew that Dode had brought Spokane along for me to ride, and he was present the day Dode pointed to the horse and said, “If a man can stay on him, that bronc has the makings of a top cow horse.”

Since I could ride my horses wherever I wanted to while training them, Brown saddled up, too, and went around with me considerable, looking at the new range and getting acquainted with it. He got quite friendly, and jogging along he continually preached “hell-roaring Spokane” to me. He declared the horse was one of the worst buckers ever when he cut loose with all he had, and hinted that even Dode was skeptical about my being able to rode him. The more Brown talked about Spokane, the more I wanted to get a rope on the salty cuss and see for myself how tough he really was. I had found few horses that were hard for me to handle – still, I also knew that “for every man, there’s a horse he cannot ride.”

In Dakota Cowboy ,Ike Blasingame paints a truly vivid picture in words of the life of the cowboy in the Dakotas during the era of the great cattle empires. But not only that, he provides a much greater backdrop against which the picture is viewed than most stories of the “old west.” Blasingame expands his treatise to include a broad range of ranching topics, from cattle management, to horses,  the weather and seasons, to the interaction among the various ranching empires, and even their inter-relationships between the federal government and the Native American peoples from whom these ranching empires leased their range. As informative and factual as these details were, however, they never overcame his descriptions of the cowboys he knew and the stories from their daily lives on the range. More than once I found myself chuckling out loud as I read Blasingame’s relation of one story or another of some cowboy prank or his way of describing some noteworthy occurrence he recalled.

As a reader and student of old west literature,  Blasingame gave me a clearer  and broader understanding of the life of a cowboy than any other source I have found. It was a fascinating read for me, both times. One of the best and most enjoyable books about “the good ol’ days” I have ever encountered.

I highly recommend it.

Click on the image and it will link to the book on Amazon.com