Making Things (slightly) Better With Leather

Lockdown was such a crazy time, to the point where it almost doesn’t seem real. We moved from standing on our balconies, banging pots and pans, on to strategizing about the most effective vaccine cocktail, and then meandered over to extreme tribalism and political upheaval. We have a remarkable ability to create bad outcomes from periods of shared experience, don’t we?

As lockdown dragged on and toilet paper shortages and grocery deliveries drifted into the background, I felt a strong urge to do something productive. Write a novel! Make some money! Plan for my future! Well…instead, I learned how to make a leather wallet.

That shit really took though! And now I’m an on again/off again leather guy. My biggest problem is that I don’t have enough things to make. I have so many belts. More than enough wallets. The house is thick with handbags. Made some shoes. I just made myself a man bag and I’ve been strutting around Main Street with that thing on my shoulder. What I really want is something that I can make for cycling. But until really heavy, not waterproof bags catch on, this is a limited market. All I can come up with is some marginal improvements to a few things using small bits of leather.

Combining Leather and Tools

I fucking love hand tools! Every regret I have from purchasing a hand tool is due to not spending enough, never from spending too much. The perfect hand tool fills me with joy. It doesn’t matter if I use it once per week or once per year. Pulling the right tool out of its happy little home and putting it to work is just the best.

Working on leather is one more excuse to buy tools. Fuckin’ punches and knives and hammers. Anvils and chiselly lookin’ shit. Pounding boards and cutting mats and needles and stitching chisels. Endless fucking tools. But oh man, cleaning up an edge with nicely sharpened edge beveler… I could sit alone in a slightly darkened room and do that shit for hours. The sound, almost like a fresh can of beer cracking open. The resistance. The nice little coil of leather, cleanly peeling off and depositing itself to the side. Fuck ya! Follow that link! Look at that tool! Don’t think too much about leather being tanned animal flesh.

And then you’ve got tools and then you need storage and that’s just a whole thing as well. And then…oh man…you’ve got your tools…you’ve got your storage…and you’ve got your leather…and you combine all three of those things and look the fuck out ‘cuz we’re just stackin’ shit like a Lower Mainland truck driver, barreling towards overpasses unknown!

Tool Roll

There are levels one can go with a tool roll. It started with a $15 tool roll that I picked up at Crappy Tire. It was fine. It held things. It rolled up. Proof of concept, really. The next phase was going to be a full custom leather tool roll. I went so far as to buy a big hunk of paper in order to start laying things out. It got a little precious though, and I realized how angry I was going to get once I needed to change up my tool game. Did I expect to need the exact same fucking tools for the next 20 years? Would SRAM changing over exclusively to Posidriv trigger my descent into madness? I could see the struggles of my future self, faced with can’t win decisions on bringing along the correct tool vs. wrecking my beautiful system. I dropped the plan.

So, I was pretty invested in a tool roll and I wanted something fancier, but not fancy, you know. I found this Carhartt one for $40 and it seemed to check all the boxes that the Crappy Tire one didn’t. Mostly, it was just better pocket design that would allow for more flexibility. I bought it, got it home, loaded up my tools, picked it up and then tools started falling all over the place because whoever designed this fucking thing certainly never experimented with filling it with tools. I planned on returning it, but then forgot. A few months later, I dug it up from underneath a pile of leather that was collecting on the side of my desk, and like the genius who dropped the peanut butter in the chocolate, I realized that I could finally stack that shit, fix the roll and get exactly what I needed.

If you haven’t used a tool roll, you’re really missing out. Unless you have a workshop where you can keep your tools and use them like a normal human being. However, if you constantly have to cart your bicycles out into the front yard to work on them, the tool roll is your friend. Why not just a tool box, you ask? Well, that’s a good question.

So, for now, the Carhartt is just perfect. It holds the tools that I use on my bike 90% of the time. It’s extremely packable and nothing is banging around. With the addition of a simple strip of leather (and a couple of rivets), it actually holds your tools so that they don’t fall on the ground.

Topeak Bit Ratchet Set

On the tool scale, I’m not sure where the Topeak Ratchet Rocket Lite sits. It’s not fancy. It’s not expensive. It’s small. It will adjust or tighten almost everything you could want to adjust or tighten on your bicycle, mid ride. It just works. The one blind spot is probably on the ultra small side (that Archer system caught me out a few times with trailside adjustments, as did my various Wahoo computer mounts), but other than that I love this thing and it’s in my pocket most rides.

However, it seems like the designer of the Carhartt tool roll got his start at Topeak designing bit ratchet cases. The bits in this thing constantly fall out! They’re usually floating around in a pocket somewhere, but it’s never a happy thing to pull a tool set out of your pocket and see missing pieces. Again, a small strip of leather and a few rivets to the rescue to just hold that shit in place like a little dutch schoolboy. Could I have stamped the various bit sizes in to the leather? Sure, but who has the time or patience? Could I have made it so the rivets don’t look horrendous? Apparently not. No matter. It just works and I haven’t lost a bit since.