As it turns out the Pacific Northwest is a damp place! When you are in the leather goods business, the top priority is keeping those hides in good shape and in an environment that is temperate and dry. After moving up to Washington state last June we put the leather workshop into a steel building on the property. The building was pretty bare bones, just a large open space and your standard steel sheeting for walls. The priority once we got up here was to get the place insulated and heated – both for comfort and to help control the very humid air up here. Living in a forest probably makes that problem a bit harder to solve. It’s just always wet here and will be for 8 months out of the year. As time went by, the insulation went in, and heating was installed but the humidity remained…inside the building. Heating air will reduce the relative humidity but in this temperate environment in the PNW, you can have days in the fall where it’s mid sixties and 95% humid. What happens is that the damp air slowly makes its way inside to the slightly warmer dryer air. Over time I would see the humidity levels increase a few percent each day hovering close to 70%. You can’t keep unwaxed leather for a prolonged period of time at that level so a solution was needed.
Since I started leatherwork I have been storing my rolled up hides on these steel and fiberboard shelves. It worked great in the Southwest, where it was dry enough to keep things in good shape. They also offered a portable solution for the numerous times the shop has moved (4 times in 5 years !). Up here in WA, this shelving style was not going to cut it. One of the main problems with it is airflow. Up here the damp air can just sit there undisturbed. 
So, looking at these old shelves I decided to come up with a better solution to help protect my investment. The first thing to do was to get the whole shop dehumidified. I purchased a large ‘whole house’ dehumidifier and had it installed into the heating system. Now when the humidity in the shop hits 42%, it kicks on with the blower and blows dry air out the ducts. The dry air measures around 20% humidity and it mixes with the more humid shop air to bring things down a bit. It’ll drop to 38% and the system shuts off. So far so good on that end…but I needed something a bit more stable and I am not sure how well the system will hold up come warmer weather and high humidity (it’s winter now so the air is relatively dry). 
I have this space under the stairway that is kind of a dead area. Can’t do too much there except store things…so why not build the shelves into that space.
Since completing the walls in the shop, I still had a fair amount of plywood and lumber so I got to work framing things up. By the way – that foam insulation on the floor works great as a backstop for cutting plywood with the circular saw on the ground.
Alright, it’s day 2 of the DIY workshop stool. I’ve finished figuring out how to put together the Grrripper (a device that lifts your hand away from the wood as you feed it through he table saw – they include a DVD which if you still have one of those ancient players it is well worth watching through), and now it’s time to prep the table saw. Initially I fed a piece of lumber through the table saw only to feel it resist an abnormal amount. It was not a pretty sight and felt a bit dangerous so I quickly hit the ‘stop’ button on the saw with my knee. After all the last thing you want is kickback – where the board slams you in the face and you have to come up with excuses for your girlfriend. Turns out my table saw needed a bit of rust sanded off the surface and a wax job. Now everything slides right through, always take care of your equipment. I ripped each leg of the stool to be 1.5 inches wide.
Well, sometime about a year ago I decided I wanted to pick up a new skill in leatherwork. I bought some books, looked around the internet and after a bit of research landed on the art of whip-making. It may sound a bit odd, but hey it’s also a bit interesting. Kind of a dying art really. Way back in the day when cattle ranching was the way of the West there were all types of specialty trades in existence, one of them included the whipmaker. Before I go any further I should explain that whips in the West were never intended to hurt the cattle. In fact hurting any cow on a ranch or in the range would be considered good reason for expulsion from all work duties.
The base of my whip is called the belly and in this case I am using several things to beef it up. The handle is actually a steel tent stake. One of those big ones that look like a huge nail. This gives the handle some weight and keeps it stiff. The insides of the whip are several layers of cowhide wrapped around thin strands of lace. I used a waxed thread to help hold the first layer in place. Then I started the plaiting. I may have two or three plaited bellies in the interior of my whip to build up girth and slowly increase the length. Since this is my first…it will undoubtedly look like a frankenstein inspired whip, but it’s a learning experience and my next one will prove to be better.
I cut the lace from a side of cowhide using a australian strand cutter and going in circles around the hide. Then I ran the strand through a lace cutter to get the width down to 6mm. The lace needs to taper all the way to the end so using one of the tools shown above I crept the razor closer with each pass and narrowed down to 3mm at the tip. 
