Molding a pancake style holster is pretty straight forward, but what about when you want all the molding on the front?
Do you cut the back leather to the size you need, cut the front bigger. Then wet the front leather, rough mold it around the gun on something flat. Then when dry, cut and fit it to the back piece, glue and sew, then mold again doing the detail work?

Also, I like to use a lighter colored thread for contrast, so I must dye before I sew, but the dye seems to dis-color the thread when sewing and polishing the leather afterwards. Anyway to keep this from happening? Is it the dye I am using? I have Tandy's Pro Dye.

thanks,

-bob

wow, you have it down. the thread, being porous, will take some of the dye. I'm not sure how to stop that but Tucker does contrasting thread so there must be a way. Perhaps dying the leather before cutting and forming is the way. I'd ask the leather makers on DefensiveCarry.com or Johanne at Tandy to be sure.

you're right, the back piece is cut to size and the front I usually oversize by the gun's maximum thickness in all directions. This leaves some scrap. I've been advised to ct it close and then finish the final trim with one of those rotary sanders to get everything exactly even.

I usually preform the "top" or outside, cut close to final, glue, punch, sew, fine bone, edge sand and trim, then dye. But I ue black thread on black holsters for now.

Best of luck.

Preface: I know nothing about any of this stuff.

Would soaking/spraying the thread in silicone and then letting it dry before stitching help make the die wash off when you're done? Of course, it'll probably make the thread harder to work with.

My pancake holsters (The Slide) are generally the same size so the molding is the same front to back. For my other OWB (The Snap) the back is the correct size (very little molding) and top piece of leather is over sized and cut to size.

I usually do a two step wet molding.
1. Cold wet forming (just wetting the surface) to get the general shape so stitching can be done close to the correct form.
2. After the holster is fully stitched and cut, I use a hot (hot tap water) dipping for 5 to 10 seconds for final forming.

I don't use glue myself. Many customer saddle makers (I have 4 of them for my horses) say the gluing makes the finished piece squeak.

Synthetic thread that is waxed will protect and minimize the amount of dye absorption into the tread.

This works for me. Keep asking questions.

Thanks guys,

I am working on my second now. I am doing another pancake. It seems more straight forward than all the molding on the front so I am going to do a few of these first to get a better idea of what I am doing. I am going to do the front mold only down the road.

Thanks again for all your help. This is a great board.

-bob