Shoe Mania, Part 3: Sandal Pieces, Unite!

Now that I had dyed and put together the uppers for my sandals, I wanted to add some padding between the soles before I put the soles together. I got some foam rubber meant for insoles that had a tan knit fabric covering on one side (Ortho Sponge Top-Cover ordered from Louis Birns & Sons). I'll get it without the fabric for next time, but this will be fine for now.

I cut out 3/4-length pieces for each foot, plus extra pieces for a second layer at the heel.


First, I glued the heel layer to the sole layer of padding. I also marked where the sandal straps will go relative to the padding.


Since the straps are all supposed to be adjustable, they need to be able to slide across the sole, so I was careful to avoid putting any contact cement where the straps will be. I'm now ready to glue the padding to the upper sole. Note that the extra layer of padding at the heel will butt right up against the strap there.



The fabric side of the foam rubber did not glue well, so it required multiple coats of the contact cement before gluing to the other piece.

Also, once I had it glued together, there wasn't enough leather to form a good bond around the padding. I pulled it back apart, trimmed the padding to be narrower, and glued it back together.


Nailing the Soles

Since I had this romantic vision of shoemakers nailing shoes together, I wanted to try that myself. Finding the right type of nails turned out to be problematic, though, since normal people don't use shoemaker's nails. There are also quite a few different types of shoemaker's nails. The instructions I was following in the "Sandal Making" book just said "Sole Nails", which turns out to be not quite the right terminology.

I ended up getting "wire clinch nails" from Louis Birns. And of course, I needed to learn yet another measurement convention. It seems that for wire clinch nails, the sizes are noted as 4/8, 5/8, 6/8, 7/8, and 8/8, where 8/8 is a nail an inch long, and 4/8 is half an inch. The trick, though, is that the tip of the nail is meant to bend over when it strikes the anvil, thus locking the nail into the leather sole. So an 8/8 nail is meant to secure a sole that is just less than an inch thick.

I used 5/8 for the main sole and 7/8 for the heel. Here you can see that the nails on the sole poke through quite a bit and bend way over--they are too long for this thickness of sole. These nails would really mess up a nice hardwood floor.

If you look closely you can see the U shape of the nails poking out from the soles--not the desired effect.

Non-slip Soling

I got a sheet of SoleTech 3.5 soling material from Louis Birns. This is pretty thin rubbery material with a slight texture to make the soles less slippery.

Here are the SoleTech pieces I cut. I don't plan to have the rubber come up over the point of the shoes, so it is cut short at the toes.


I glued on the SoleTech with more contact cement. I also dyed the edges of the sandals blue and treated them with Lexol and carnauba creme as I did with the upper soles and straps.

Here are the finished sandals. Yay! I've finished my first pair!


Thoughts for Next Time

Nails: The 7/8 wire clinch nails I used around the heels worked fine, but the 5/8 nails I used for the much thinner sole section were too long. This caused them to form raised "U" shapes on the surface of the sole when they bent over, instead of having just the tip bending flat back into the sole.

Bottom sole surfacing: I had some trouble with having the SoleTech sheet peeling off the sandals, particularly where the nails stuck up from the leather sole, causing about a square centimeter of the SoleTech to not adhere well to the leather sole with the contact cement. I had to redo the sole piece for one sandal, partly because I had cut it a little small, and a couple of nails stuck out right at the edge, aggravating the peeling problem. The second time I cut the SoleTech piece a little larger than the sole, and I trimmed off the excess with a knife after gluing. That worked much better. I think trimming the rubber to the sole also helps avoid creating a place where the rubber can catch on something and be pulled off. Later, though, I plan to try some different soling materials. This SoleTech 3.5 is really too thin and fragile for the sandals I'm making, and it's wearing through much too quickly.

Cement: It also seemed that the contact cement wasn't strong enough (except for its smell!) for gluing the rubber to the leather, though it was fine for the leather-to-leather bond. One of the guys at the leather store suggested using multiple coats of the cement on each side before putting them together. I tried multiple coats later, and it helped (though at that later point I was also using the new Barge formula of Tandy's contact cement, which may have worked better, though it smelled even worse than the previous cement).

The Lure of Leather

This is the piece of thick "saddle skirting" leather I used for my soles. It was an entire side before I started cutting it, and it takes up most of my kitchen floor.


Once in a while I get way too much help! Both my younger daughter and Lacey think this is just the place to plop down for a bit...


And, of course, they want some sandals too!

Shoe Mania, Part 2: Strappy Uppers

In my previous sandal-making post, I cut and formed the soles and heels of my new sandals. During the time I was waiting for those to dry, I started working on the uppers of the sandals. I started by preparing the straps.

The buckles I was using required a size #6 hole for the buckle tongues. I thought I'd try to save some time later by preparing the strap ends with holes and points ahead of time, as shown in the picture. It turned out that it made the fitting a little bit harder, so I won't do it that way again. It's easier to make the holes and such later than it is to correctly position the buckle later.

I used a half-inch oblong punch (also known as a bag punch or oval punch) to make the holes for my straps. I had put my foot on the upper sole to mark the hole locations. I find the punches to be kind of slippery and hard to hold, so I put the rubber bands on to improve the grip. It didn't help much, unfortunately.

Here I tried putting the straps in place, and the whole thing is held together with more rubber bands (if I had to be stranded on a desert island, I'd want a big bag of rubber bands with me).

Here is how the straps look from under the upper sole. You can imagine that these fairly thick straps might be a bit uncomfortable to walk on, since you would feel them as lumps through the upper sole.

One way to deal with the lumpy strap problem is suggested in the Sandal Making book: use a scarier-looking version of a man's razor, called a skiver (in this case a "Super Skiver"), to carefully scrape off enough thickness from the upper sole so that the straps nestle into the sole. Depending on the thicknesses of the straps and the sole, this approach varies in its success.

One thing I found is that the skiver takes a lot of practice to use, and it's a bit like using a potato peeler. The amount of material you take off in one swipe depends on the angle of the handle relative to the leather surface. It's really easy to dig right into your leather and cut off more than you intended. On the other hand, if you stay timid, you'll take a lot of time and not get deep enough. Practice, practice, practice.

Another approach, which I didn't do on this pair of sandals (guess what's coming in a future blog), is to skive the upper sole, the lower sole, and the straps. That doesn't work for all cases, though, such as where the straps are adjustable and you may later expose a part of the strap that was initially covered.

Dyeing

The next step is to dye the various pieces before assembly. Similar to how I finished my third belt, I dyed them all with Tandy's Leather Dye, cleaned them with Lexol, and finished them with a layer of Tandy's Carnauba Creme. I dyed the entire length of each strap (both sides) since the adjustable straps will be able to slide through the shoe--I don't know for certain what parts will show, and it may change over time.


Here is how buffing affects the look of the Carnauba Creme. The lower piece in the picture has been buffed with a cloth and is nice and shiny. There are some white flecks of wax on the upper piece.


I couldn't resist putting the shoes back together with the rubber bands to see how they looked at this point:


Hardware

Adding the hardware, the buckles and rivets, was one of the more satisfying stages for me. This is when things started to look really cool and shiny.

Since I hadn't done buckles before, I had to play with getting the size and location of the slot correct on the strap. I tried my half-inch and three-quarter-inch punches, as well as punching two small holes and using a knife to cut out the leather between them (second hole from the right).


The three-quarter-inch punch worked the best for my half-inch sandal buckles.


Here you can see the slot for the buckle and the corresponding holes for the rivet that holds the buckle onto the strap:


Here are the uppers with buckles and rivets, all ready for the final assembly to the lower soles.


To be continued....

Absolutely Riveting

I'm currently in the middle of a leather project that requires buckles and rivets. I'm usually pretty self-confident (arrogant? lazy?) on trying new techniques, and often jump right in on the main project. Fortunately this time I tried out my rivets on some scrap leather first, because I immediately ran into trouble. When I riveted my two leather strips together, the rivet tops and bottoms ended up offset from each other!

Rivets of Many Types

When I was trying to figure out how to describe my riveting project, I thought I'd look up rivets on Wikipedia. The article describes several types of rivets, such as solid rivets and pop rivets, but not what I'm using, which are Rapid Rivets (Tandy's brand name for "cap rivets").

I kept looking, and I found a very good tutorial on using cap rivets for making bags (pretty similar to my project: riveting straps). I wish I had found it before I did my trial and error, but then I wouldn't have had half so much fun! But if you want to do anything with cap rivets, I recommend you take a look at Lisa's U-Handbag riveting tutorial.

Riveting Trouble

The first few rivets I set came out similar to the rivet on the right side of the following picture. The cap did get connected to the top of the shaft, but the shaft suddenly bent relative to the bottom part, leaving the top offset from the bottom, usually on about the second whack with the mallet. Not exactly the result I had hoped for.

One of the guys at the Tandy shop diagnosed my problem as two-fold: 1) I didn't have the right kind of hard surface to place the bottom part (shaft piece) of the rivet, and I was using rivets whose shaft was too long for the thickness of the leather I was putting together.

Hard Surface

I've been doing my leather work on the kitchen table (much to the distress of my family at mealtimes). It's a fairly sturdy table, but for setting rivets, you need something really flat and hard, like a big polished granite block or a big chunk of metal. I got myself a little 2-pound metal mini anvil from Tandy for the purpose.


That anvil is so cute! It looks like something right out of a Road Runner cartoon, except it's small enough to hold in your hands. I figure that when I'm not whacking stuff on it, it can serve as a paperweight. It works just fine as the base for whacking rivets.

In the photo above, I have a medium rivet sticking through the hole on the left, and a small rivet on the right. The corresponding caps are in front of them. Note that the diameter of the shaft is the same for both, but the length of the shaft differs. The shorter one is more appropriate for this thickness of leather. The metal cylinder with the red ring and the orange rubberbands is the rivet setter. I put the red (cupped) end on the rivet cap and hit the other (flat) end with my mallet. I have the red nail polish and the orange rubberbands on the rivet setter to give me both tactile and visual clues that I'm using the correct end--I kept trying to use the wrong end on the rivet cap.

Punching Holes

I have this rotary hole puncher that can do six different sizes of holes. Of course, rather than giving hole sizes, they are conveniently labeled 1 through 6. Guess what? 6 is the smallest. One of the first things I did with it was to punch holes in a piece of scrap leather, with one hole of each size. I labeled 1 through 6, and now I have a handy gauge to use when I need to figure out which hole sizes to punch for belts and sandal straps. I can test them by pushing the buckle tongues (the little wiggly bit that goes through the strap hole) through the sample to see what size is big enough, but not too big.

One thing I've learned is that even though the punches are supposed to be self-cleaning, the little leather circles often pile up and get stuck in the punch tubes. This makes punching the next hole more difficult, since you are trying to put a hole through your leather as well as push against the circle buildup. So I push them out with an unbent paperclip periodically.

The other thing for me is that I have fairly small, weak hands, and squeezing this tool hard enough to put a hole through thick leather such as saddle skirting is really difficult! It's easier if you push the bottom handle against the work surface and let your weight do more of the work (hey, can I use that as an excuse to eat more?). Rubber-coated gardening gloves help too. They help keep the tool from slipping out of my hands.

When I'm doing rivets, I need to punch holes first for the rivet shank to go through. They work best when the hole is small enough to be a tight fit on the shaft (back) piece. That's a Size 6 hole on this punch.

Smaller Rivets

In the photos above, I show two sizes of rivets. I had initially been using Medium Rapid Rivets. Since I needed a shorter shaft, I switched to Small Rapid Rivets. Unfortunately, the caps and backs of the rivets are smaller in diameter to go with the shorter shaft. For my project, I prefer the look of the medium rivets over the small, but fortunately it's only a slight preference. So since I can choose to do my design any way I want, I decided I "want" to use the smaller rivets!

Riveting Results

I really like the results of joining pieces of leather with rivets. It's very clean and neat and quick, unlike hand stitching (not quick!) or nailing (not neat), both of which I'm also doing in my current projects.