This might just be a normal thing that everyone else does, but I was thinking about this while I was driving around last night and then got home and tried it and thought I'd share it here in case it's helpful for anyone else who doesn't know anything like I do. All you need is a very sharp skiving knife and something with a set thickness, in this video I'm using two pieces I cut off of a cereal box that I use to glue paper patterns onto since I eat a lot of cereal and figure recycling it myself is a lot better than spending money on greyboard since it's basically free and I can just glue as many pieces together as I need to get the thickness that I want. I also tried it with the metal rulers I have and it works just as well. Anyway, the box pieces are 0.6mm thick and I tested it with a narrow strip of ostrich but in this video I'm using goatskin that I got from Buy Leather Online and as you can see it stretches a lot so that's something to consider. The piece in the video started off at 32mm and ended up with the thinnest part at around 27mm, but also don't think I'm really great at sharpening so maybe a sharper knife would yield better refults. You're really only limited by the width of your skiving knife, and also works a lot better if you either have a flat one with no handle or come directly off of the edge of your table or whatever surface you're using. I suppose if you were using a couple pieces of metal as the guides you could just work the knife along instead of just pulling the leather through and maybe reduce the amount of stretch, but I didn't have two pieces of metal of the same thickness. When I tried with the small 0.5mm thick ruler I just indexed it off the one side and made sure to keep it flat, but having something on either side makes it more foolproof.
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Nicely done, I'm impressed you kept the leather from riding up and and cutting through! Especially difficult with softer leather. Thank you for sharing Johnny.
I'm working on another Turenne bag and I thought maybe I could apply the same principle to the skiving of the backs of the pieces, and it actually worked out pretty well! It does involve a lot of hand pressure all around, and I was keeping my eye on the heel end of the blade to make sure it was indexed against the ruler at all times but yeah it cut at least 30 minutes off compared to how long it took to skive everything on the last one I made where I was using a french edger and hating myself haha.