Leather case repair

[PeterW]

Hi all,

I picked up a very useful tip posted by Malcolm Campbell on the Yahoo Camera-Fix forum about repairing leather cases.

He recommended using Pacer Formula 560 Canopy Glue from a model shop to glue leather. It's a milky looking glue a bit like white wood glue and dries clear. It takes about three hours to dry and gets its maximum strength after 24 hours. I got a bottle from my local model shop and tried it to glue the detached drop flap on an ERC where it had come apart at the hinge, a notorious weak point because it gets a lot of folding. It worked beautifully, but I think I'll also reinforce it on the inside with a strip of cloth because it gets a lot of folding back and forth.

My next job with it will be to glue the edges of a couple of box-style hard leather cases where the stitching has perished. I know from experience how difficult it is to hold the edges in position while you stitch them, so if I glue them first it should make the job so much easier.

Peter

[John Parry]

Interesting Peter,

Sounds like it may be just the thing to use when re-covering a camera. Still working up to that project, and going to have a go from scratch. The three hours drying time sounds as though by getting the timing right it will let you do a little sliding around to line things up. I was a bit worried about using Bostik or Evo-stik, 'cause when they touch they're stuck.

Talking of that, I notice that there is quite a market for skins/hides on eBay. How thick should the new cover be? Anybody tried using those sting-ray skins - they look quite good (apart from destroying the planet of course).

Rachel will be pleased to hear that I've gone off handbags!!

Regards - John

[PeterW]

Hi John,
Not sure how it would be for recovering a camera. You would have to experiment. It isn't tacky when you first use it so I imagine the leather or vinyl would have to held down while it dried - not easy on some cameras with curved bodies. Also, I don't know if it would lift up again easily if you ever needed to do so, like to get at the screws for the front panel. I prefer an instant-stick contact adhesive where the covering is unlikely to need moving some time in the future. If you start at one side and 'feed' the covering down, like gently closing the page of a book ,it usually goes on OK, but I don't press it down hard till I'm certain it's where I want it.

I've also used a 'solvent free' water based contact adhesive from my local Wilkinson's. This gave about 5 to 10 seconds 'positioning time' which I found was ample, but again I found it had to be held down on curved surfaces or the covering didn't finish up flat against the metal. It would, however, lift again easily, even when it was dry, if you were careful.

With regard to thickness of coverings, this varies with different camera makers. Some skins are quite thick and need shaving at the edges to get them to sit nicely in the rebate on the camera body. With leather you can do this, if you're careful, with plastic throw-away razors, any old cheap brand from a supermarket is fine, but it takes a little practice to get an even shaving. The slightly thicker leather does give a nice 'quality' feel, though.

Other makers, like Kodak in what I call their middle period, about 1915 to the mid thirties, used very thin leather. I suspect it may have been lambskin.

Modern vinyls, as used in upholstery, can't usually be shaved at the edges because they've got a cloth backing which seems to be a sort of half cloth half foam, which doesn't shave nicely. At the moment I've got a fair stock of vinyl leathercloth which my local car breaker let me cut from old car seats and door panels. He told me which cars I could cut from and which I couldn't, and charged me a pound for a carrier bag full. Some of it's a bit dirty and muddy, but it cleans up OK. All the lighter colours and the browns will dye black with shoe dye, but red for some reason doen't dye nicely. I found it goes patchy.

I used to be friendly with a local antiquarian bookbinder who got me half
a treated lambskin from his suppliers. Goatskin is also thin, but not so nice because it varies in thickness and the outer surface is often full of small flaws. Also, it seldom comes with the usual camera pebble pattern. Lambskin is usually skived, or 'thicknessed' with a big knife machine, and the surface pattern is impressed in it by hot damp rollers, and then it's it's dyed and glazed.

I learned quite a lot about leather from that old guy but
unfortunately he's now retired and the business is closed, so I'm on the lookout for another one, but antiquarian bookbinders are few and far between, usually in university and museum towns. Most modern bookbinders use just a cheap paper backed cloth.

Oh yes, while I'm preaching, I don't know what other people do when covering from scratch but I usually cover the camera panel with a couple of layers of masking tape, cut round the edges with a Swan Morton scapel, then lift it off and stick it on the new covering as a cutting guide. You can mark the position of any round holes for delayed action timers and so on with a sharp pencil and use a round punch on the new covering to cut them out. It's the most accurate method I've yet come across.

For some cameras you can buy ready-cut self-adhesive covering, but to my mind it's an expensive way of going about it, and for a keen DIY'er/camera tinkerer it's a bit like cheating.

Sorry to preach a long sermon, but it's possibly a popular topic, so I thought I'd pass on what little I know.

Peter