Several vegetable-tanned leather bends hanging on a wooden rail in a workshop, showing natural grain and marks.
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Reading a Bend Before You Pay for It

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis

Thickness first, then the hand, then the flesh side, and only then the marks.

A leather bend is the firm strip of hide along the animal’s back, and judging one before you pay for it starts with a number the eye cannot see: how thick it really is, and whether it stays that thick from one end to the other. Stand at a rack of bends and the grain side shouts at you, every scratch and shade change right there on the surface. Ignore it for a minute. The marks will still be there in five, while a thin spot in the middle of a panel keeps its mouth shut until it is cut, skived and stitched into something that sags.

Video: Inspecting a black English Bridle Leather Hide, from Marcellino NY Briefcase Maker on YouTube.

I go over every hide when it comes in, before any of it becomes a briefcase, and I have put one of those inspections, a black English bridle hide, on video. I buy Grade A full-grain vegetable-tanned bridle, from American tanneries and from the UK depending on what is available, as I lay out on my Leather Choices page. A hide that comes in wrong goes back where it came from. What follows is the order I would hand a beginner standing at that rack. It comes from the tanneries and suppliers who sell the stuff, and from a few people who study what a hide carries out of the animal’s life. My part is the order and the opinions, and I will tell you which is which.

Know what part of the animal is in your hands

The bend comes off the spine, where the hide is tightest.

Hands checking a leather bend's thickness with a tapered-slot gauge on a wooden bench.

The words first, because sellers use them loosely and the price follows the word. A side is half a hide, split down the backbone. A bend is the strip running along that spine, and Weaver Leather Supply calls it the thickest and firmest part of the hide, for jobs where minimum stretch, firmness and durability are essential. The shoulder sits forward of it and carries creases. The belly hangs below, with softer, looser fibers.

Popov Leather describes the bend in nearly the same words, and calls the belly stretchy and loose. Tandy Leather gives rough sizes: a side at about 21 to 26 square feet, a double bend at 22 to 26, a single bend at 11 to 15, a belly at 4 to 7. Tandy notes the bend holds a steadier shape with little give and calls the belly inexpensive, good for small projects and testing.

That matters at the rack. A bend priced like a bend should behave like one, and a strap or a handle wants that spine leather under it every time the case gets lifted. A gusset can live with less.

On my bench the panels come out of the bend and nowhere else. The shoulder goes to small parts. The belly goes in the trash, and it was billed by the square foot like the rest of the hide, so that trash can is the most expensive thing in the shop.

The vocabulary has a catch, too. Weaver says the neck, often sold as part of the back, can carry barbed-wire scratches and fat wrinkles yet has as much tensile strength as the bend, sometimes more. So a mark near the neck end does not mean weak leather. It means a mark. For how the main leather types differ before you even get to the cut, the older post Discovering the Different Types of Leather covers the ground.

Check thickness at more than one spot

A hide is sold by one number and measured by many.

Leather is sold by weight, but weight here means thickness. Weaver’s chart page gives the rule that one ounce equals 1/64 inch, and says plainly that hides seldom match a stated weight across the whole piece, because a natural hide always varies a little. Even leather run through a splitter comes out more consistent but not perfect. Heddels, in a primer on leather weights, makes the same point and explains why weights usually come as a range, such as 4 to 5 ounces, rather than a single figure.

So the first thing in your hand should be a gauge. Push the edge of the bend into it at the butt end, the middle, and the shoulder end, then along both edges. Heddels describes the common type: a tapered slot that reads in ounces as the leather slides in.

Where the number was taken matters. The same supplier’s listing for a Hermann Oak bridle side, offered in 8 and 10 ounce weights, notes that it is gauged in the butt. That is the thick end. A bend can read its full weight there and lose some toward the shoulder, and on a briefcase panel that loss turns into one side of a seam sitting lower than the other, which your fingers will find on the first pass and your eye on the second.

My opinion: a beginner should write the readings down on a scrap of paper before thinking about anything else. A tannery’s weight is an honest average. Your panel is not an average. It is one rectangle, cut from one place, and the leather does not care what you paid.

Then trust your hands on the temper

Fold a corner, press the middle, and feel where the leather gives.

Macro view of full-grain leather showing a healed scar and fine vein lines in the grain.

After the gauge, the hands. None of the tannery pages I fetched lay out a formal feel test for firmness, so treat what follows as my take on their descriptions, not a standard. What they agree on is where the leather softens: toward the belly and the flanks.

Tandy’s advice on choosing leather warns that areas near the belly and neck often show different colors and are usually stretchier and more fibrous, and says that is typically normal. Nick Horween, interviewed by Stitchdown about loose grain, explains that leather cut from the flanks or belly is more prone to it, because those areas flex more in the animal’s life and the fiber structure is spongier. Loose grain shows up as a coarse wrinkling of the top surface when the leather bends, the grain pulling away from the layers under it.

That gives you something to do with both hands. Fold a corner of the bend grain side out, gently, along the edge toward the belly line. Fine, tight creasing is normal. Coarse, deep creases unlike the rest of the piece say the fibers there are looser. In that interview loose grain comes out as largely cosmetic in shoes, a matter of preference more than performance. A briefcase flap is another matter. It folds a thousand times, looks and mechanics start to overlap, and in my view it is worth knowing which end of the bend that flap will come from before the knife goes in.

Bridle complicates this. My Leather Choices page describes English bridle as a finish that is very waxy, thick, heavy and stiff, and slow to soften. It will feel firm almost everywhere under your thumb. What you are hunting for is relative, the middle of the bend against its edges, not this hide against a softer one at the next rack.

Turn it over before you look at the grain

The flesh side tells you about the cutting, the splitting, and the hidden cuts.

Most buyers look at the pretty side. Turn the bend over first.

Tandy’s buying advice says to check the back for cuts or scars that could affect the work, and notes that a clean back often means the hide was split to an even weight. A rough, uneven flesh side is not a fault by itself, but it can mean the thickness wanders more than the label says. Which sends you straight back to the numbers on your scrap of paper.

Look for knife marks too. A 1935 Bureau of Standards circular on upholstery leather specifications set its top selection as free from brands, patches, knife cuts, knife scores and open grub holes, and notes that most defects stem from things the tanner cannot control. Old document, different trade. Its list still draws a clean line between marks on the surface and damage that goes into the leather. A knife score on the flesh side of a bend is the second kind. It sits there quiet, waiting like a bad weld, until a strap is cut across it and folds along it, and then the strap breaks where the hide was already half cut.

My opinion: one deep flesh-side cut in the middle of a bend costs more usable leather than a dozen grain-side scratches near its edge.

The spotless bend is not always the best buy

Healed scars and veins are the animal’s life story, while holes and deep cuts are damage.

A cut chestnut bridle leather briefcase panel lying next to the leather bend it came from.

Now the grain. Here the urge to pay more for a clean face runs straight into what full-grain leather is. My Leather Care page says it flat: “This is full grain and will have natural variations.” Full grain keeps the original top layer, so whatever the animal lived through stays on it.

The sources sort those marks into two piles. Stevie Burrell, writing for the tannery Yarwood Leather, lists neck grains, veins, stretch marks, healed scars, insect bites and shade differences as part of the hide’s character, and says of healed scars that the “structural integrity remains intact.” Garrett Leather says these markings do not compromise strength, and that healed scars often cannot be felt and are more stable than the leather around them. The Leather Dictionary entry agrees about a well-healed scar.

That same entry marks the other pile. It says leather is unusable where injuries such as pitchfork wounds occurred often and healed badly, that warts can tear during tanning, and that warble fly leaves holes in the skin. Those are the marks that cost you the joint. An open hole, a tear, a scar that never closed.

So the question at the rack changes. Not “is it clean?” but “where are the marks, and which pile are they in?” RM Leather Supply notes that tanneries grade a hide as a whole, so one small blemish does not change its grade. Wickett & Craig, in a Stitchdown profile of the Curwensville, Pennsylvania tannery, grades finished leather by usable yield, with 70 percent or better as its top grade. A top-grade hide still has marks. It just has them where they cost the least.

This is the part a beginner has to swallow, and it goes down hard, because it means the clean-looking hide you wanted can be the worst buy on the rack. A spotless bend can still be thin in the middle, or loose at one edge, or cut on the back. A bend with two healed scars and a vein can be the soundest leather there, because the scars sit outside where the panels go. My opinion: the honest buyer reads a marked bend for where the patterns will land, the way a carpenter reads a board for knots before deciding which end becomes the shelf.

Now turn that on me. I tell you to buy the marked bend, and I mean every word. Then a hide comes in with a flaw no customer would find for years, and it eats at me anyway, because my name goes on the case. The leather is sound. My own argument is sound. My stomach does not care about either one.

And the marks do not stand still. The post on how a Marcellino briefcase will look in 100 years walks through bridle darkening by several tones over a decade, with the handled spots going darker first. In my experience sun and oil push that along faster on undyed vegetable-tanned leather. My opinion: a vein that looks loud on the rack may settle into the color of the whole case. I would not promise it. I would not bet the case on it either.

WUTA Leather Thickness Gauge: A dial gauge that reads leather thickness from 0 to 10 mm in 0.1 mm steps, one way to take the readings described above. See it on Amazon (affiliate link).

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. A commission may be earned if you buy through this link, at no extra cost to you.

Sources

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