Casing Leather Surface Casing vs.

Thru-Casing

by B. J. (Kirk) Kuykendall

Casing leather properly is important to producing quality tooling results, and as the
size and/or complexity of the piece increase, the casing requirements move from
important to critical. While surface casing may be adequate for a small piece, say
one that will require only an hour or so from tracing the pattern onto the leather to
completion of the tooling, for more complex or just physically larger pieces (where
several hours are required, or where you expect to have to set the work aside for a
time and come back to it) thru-casing will improve your results, perhaps even
dramatically. The remainder of this article will be dedicated to explaining why this is
true and to help you determine what kind of casing will be required for each piece of
every project requiring stamping.

So, what exactly do we mean when we speak of casing leather? Before beginning
to stamp a pattern into a piece of leather, the leather must be moist. The process of
moisturizing and controlling the moistness of the leather for the duration of the
tooling is called casing. There are two basic methods to case leather. Granted,
there are many variations to each of these two methods, but the two methods are
called Surface Casing, and Thru-Casing.

Surface Casing is what you do when you use a sponge (or some such applicator) to
wet down the skin-side surface of a piece of dry leather just prior to applying the
pattern to be tooled onto the leather. It is called surface casing because the water
applied to the surface only soaks in part way through the leather. That is, there is
still dry leather beneath. It is somewhat like taking a hard dry sponge and starting to
clean up a spill with it. Though the bottom surface wets readily enough, the hard stiff
dry upper part takes both time and work before it begins to absorb moisture. With
surface casing, the amount of water applied to the surface is not enough to wet the
leather through.

Thru-Casing is a method that wets the leather all the way through before being
tooled. It requires a period of time to pass to allow the water to migrate through the
leather. To continue the analogy above, it is the functional equivalent of allowing the
sponge to continue to sit in the spill until liquid has wicked up through the sponge
until it is moist through. To do this, a generous amount of water is applied to both
the skin-side and the flesh-side of the leather, then it is set aside for at least an hour
up to overnight depending on the thickness of the leather.

Now that we have defined the two methods, we can begin to discuss how each
method affects the quality of the resulting finished piece. I wont spend a lot of time
discussing why leather must be moist to accept the tooling impressions, beyond the
general understanding that if the leather is too dry when stamped, it wont accept the
stamp impression, and if it is too wet, it wont retain the impression. (Leather that is
too dry requires excessive force to draw a swivel knife through; Stamping tools tend
to leave shiny burnish marks when struck rather than impressions. Leather that is
too wet will form deep initial impressions, but will not produce the darkening that
results from the compression of the inner layers of the leather; swivel knife cuts will
look right immediately after the stroke, but fifteen minutes later, the two sides have
swelled back together and the stroke has become a line. Similarly, stamped
impressions will rebound over the first half hour.) For that reason it is fundamental
that maintaining proper moisture in the leather is essential. My purpose here is to
point out how the two casing methods can be used to that end.

If the piece to be worked is of light weight leather (say 4-5 oz or less), you usually
end up with thru-casing even if you only apply water from the front. The caveat here
is that more often than not, you get parts of the leather that are thru-cased and
other parts that are not because the moisture was not applied evenly. When this
happens, only the passage of time (or the addition of water) can restore moisture
evenness.

At one time, I routinely used a damp/wet sponge to wet the front side of my work
(for all weights of leather), but it was difficult to get even distribution across the
absorbent leather, and by the time I had achieved evenness, the leather was often
too wet to tool. Later I changed to spray application, using a thoroughly cleaned
spray bottle that had once held Windex. That is now my default applicator. For light
leathers, this works well for both initial and re-wetting; on heavier leathers I use it
primarily for re-wetting. More on that later.

On any weight leather, surface casing
dries out faster than thru-casing, and
the thinner the leather, the more quickly
the surface dries out, and the more
difficult it is to keep the moisture level
near the optimum. And heres a nugget:
getting leather too wet after it has been
tooled makes it act the same way that it
acts if it is too wet while you are tooling.
Perfectly good impressions will begin to
rise up (i.e. flatten back out)! So the
more times you have to re-wet a piece,
the more damage you are going to do
the parts youve already worked, that is
unless you can either add moisture from
the back side of the piece, or use a fine
spray applied sparingly to the front so
that the front face never gets too wet.
Certainly the former option is much more forgiving and less tedious, and should be
chosen whenever it is available. In the picture above, you can see some of the
effects of re-wetting completed sections of work over and over while you are
finishing other parts of the piece. The natural color has been bleached out; the
bottoms of all the swivel-knife cuts have become ragged and discolored, and the
texture of the skin-surface has become rough and porous. Only the use of something
like a Hi-lite dye that settles into and seals all the knife-cuts with dark color can
salvage this piece.

Obviously, leather dries from the surface, with moisture beneath the surface wicking
up to replace that lost on the surface. So how can we make that process work for us.
It is the top half of the leather that is being worked the most, and is the part of the
finished work that you see. Therefore, it is the moisture content of this top half that
we need most to control.

If the leather is moist through, it dries out more slowly because the reservoir of
moisture under the surface is deeper and holds more water. By replenishing that
Work that has been re-wetted too many times.
moisture from below, the change in moisture content at or near the front surface is
minimized and with it the effects noted above. If you can avoid having to put a
waterproof backing on the piece (to minimize stretching during tooling) then re-
wetting from the back is the ideal choice.

Even with relatively small jobs on 8 oz or heavier leather, like a belt, I will thru-case
the ready-to-pattern belt blank by thoroughly wetting it down front and back, then
placing it in a zip-lock baggie and leaving it in the refrigerator overnight (at least 8
hrs). When I am ready to start tooling the belt, I take it out of the baggie, trace the
pattern onto it and start tooling. With a basketweave or geometric pattern belt, I can
tool the whole thing in 2-2 hours without ever having to re-wet it at all! The point
here is that 8-9 oz thru-cased leather can be worked continuously for at least two
hours without any re-wetting, and will retain near optimum tooling properties
throughout. If your project piece is even larger (say, 6 hrs), you can continue to
work without interruption it if you will turn it over and spray the back side down a
bit, then turn the piece back up and continue. Since most of the back side is against
your slab-base, it is not losing moisture at all except up into the leather. If you have
let the top dry out too much (for whatever reason), then spray the back down well,
and put the piece back into the baggie (or under glass, see below), press as much of
the air out as you can easily do, zip it up and put it back in the fridge for an hour or
so . . . or until you are ready to work on the piece again. If you keep the bag sealed
and refrigerated, you can keep it like that for days. As an alternative to the baggie, I
have used a large pane of heavy glass (that I use under my skiving knife) placed on
top of the leather (which is still on my tooling slab) so as to seal both top and bottom
if I am only going to be away for an hour or so. This works fine so long as the piece
isnt bigger than either the glass or the slab.

There are many differing opinions concerning what constitutes the best wetting
solution, so do feel free to try whatever options might be recommended to you, but
be sure to try them out on scrap first, and by try them out I mean from soaking all the
way through the process of swivel-cutting and tooling, staining, and final finishing
before you risk it on work that matters.

I use plain tap water, so long as it doesnt contain a lot of iron (from passing through
old, rusted pipes) or salts (from passing through a household-size water softener).
Bottled water or distilled water provides valid inexpensive alternatives. Some folks
recommend adding a very small quantity of soap (not detergent) to the solution, but
soap is becoming increasingly difficult to find. The most readily available source
these days is Ivory soap (if you can find it). An alternative is Castile soap, but is
harder to find. Addition of these soaps is reputed to reduce the friction of the swivel-
knife passing through the leather, but in my experience the difference is small
enough that it may not even be detectable. The recommended quantity is no more
than a couple of shavings in a pint of water (and the required quality of the water is
the same, with or without the additive). Too strong a solution can affect the ability of
the leather to accept stains later on. My own preference is to use an inexpensive
bottled water, like the spring water available at most grocers for less than a dollar
a gallon.