Best Leather Edge Finishing Tools

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An edge gets finished one of two ways, and the leather decides which. Vegetable tanned stock burnishes, so you take the corner off, wet the edge with a gum or water based burnishing compound, and work it with friction until the fibers lie down and go glassy. That route wants a slicker with several grooves cut at different widths so the tool matches your stack thickness, and hardwood beats plastic because it takes the heat of fast rubbing without dragging. Chrome tanned, layered and fabric backed edges will not compact like that, so they get painted instead, using a flexible acrylic or resin coat built up in two or three thin passes with drying time between them, applied with a roller or a fine tip rather than flooded on. Thin coats are the whole technique, because one thick pass cracks the first time the piece flexes. Whichever route you take, the preparation is identical and it is the step beginners skip. A safety beveler or edge trimmer takes the square corner off both faces first, otherwise you are polishing a shape that was never round. A creaser then presses a line a millimeter or two in from the edge, and the width you pick there should relate to your stitch spacing, not to the thickness of the leather.