Polishing brass hardware on a bridle leather briefcase, with one half of the buckle bright and one half tarnished.
| |

Polishing Brass Hardware Without Hurting the Leather

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis

The polish is for the metal. The leather an eighth of an inch away never asked for it.

Polishing brass hardware on a leather bag is a small job with a big blast radius, because every buckle, lock plate, ring and rivet sits in a nest of vegetable-tanned leather that drinks whatever the rag leaves behind. Brass is the easy part. It tarnishes, you rub it, it shines. The leather under the tongue of the buckle and around the edge of the lock plate is the part that pays, and it pays slowly, so most people never connect the dark ring around their hardware with the tin of polish in the drawer.

Video: How to easily polish your belt buckle, from Cowboy Compass on YouTube.

That’s Cowboy Compass on getting a belt buckle bright, not my channel. Short, plain, and a buckle is the right place to start. What follows is the argument for doing it the slow way on a bag, and then the argument against doing it at all.

Bright brass is worth keeping

I like the shine. I just don’t trust the rag.

Gloved hands sliding a card shield under a brass buckle to protect the leather before polishing.

I’ll state my bias first. The cases I build carry solid brass. Solid brass handles with a bar underneath, a solid brass tube-key lock, and Italian-made locks of solid brass under palladium plating, which are the best I’ve seen. My high-end locks page makes the case for brass over the zinc “pot metal” that turns up on most bags. So I’ve got skin in this.

Brass doesn’t rust. The post on why solid brass outlasts the leather goes through it: copper and zinc, no iron, it darkens and forms a skin instead of failing, and in damp conditions against veg-tan it can throw a faint green cast. That post says a cloth and a little polish bring the shine back. True. It doesn’t say what the cloth does to the leather on the way past.

People polish tack all the time, and horse people are honest about it. Lucy Robinson at Horse FactBook, in her guide to cleaning tack, says a little metal polish “will work wonders” on buckles and D-rings, with brass or silver polish to suit the metal. She also says to keep it off anything that goes in the horse’s mouth or near his eyes. Which tells you the stuff isn’t harmless. It just isn’t harmful to brass.

My opinion: bright brass on a dark bridle case is one of the few bits of flash a working bag is allowed. If you want it, keep it. The rest of this post is how to keep it without paying for it in leather.

Start with the mildest thing that works

Chalk before rouge, rouge before wadding, wadding before the liquid in the tin.

Conservators have thought about this longer than leatherworkers have. The Canadian Conservation Institute’s note on cleaning, polishing and waxing brass and copper starts with the gentlest method there is: a paste of precipitated chalk and water on a soft cloth. If that fails, a jeweller’s cloth with rouge. After that, a wadding polish, carefully, because hard rubbing leaves scratches you can see.

The same note warns about the tins on the hardware store shelf. Automotive and stainless-steel polishes often carry hard particles that scratch copper alloys, some leave a film behind, and many contain ammonia, which can dissolve copper under some conditions. Its line on the best-known one is blunt: “Be cautious of commercial polishes such as Brasso.”

The National Park Service’s Conserve O Gram 10/2, written by objects conservator Deborah Long, says much the same. Skip commercial polishes. Use precipitated calcium carbonate in denatured alcohol. Use very little, because too much is the common mistake.

On the leatherworker side, the cleaning brass hardware thread on Leatherworker.net lands on wadding too. One member, Ian, says Never Dull is less messy than most brass cleaners and leaves no residue in the recesses. Another, Kowboyboots, rates Wenol and Flitz as both very good and has little use for Brasso. Chronicle of the Horse’s Lindsay Berreth, in a piece on cleaning everything on tack that isn’t leather, suggests a wadding polish for fittings because it’s less messy than paste.

Less mess is the whole game. Mess is what reaches the leather.

Keep the polish off the leather

Shield it, wear gloves, and get the residue out of the corners before it moves.

Macro of a toothpick clearing polish residue from around a brass rivet set in leather.

The best line I found on this came from a Pony Club judge, not a conservator. Sydney Wilson told Berreth: “If you put metal polish on, it can damage the leather under the buckles.” The piece notes that buckles are stress points, where leather often cracks first and grime builds up underneath.

So shield it. The GSA’s historic preservation procedure for cleaning and polishing solid brass covers nearby surfaces with polyethylene film sealed with waterproof masking tape. It also says flat out: “Do not apply liquid masking agent to porous surfaces.” Leather is about as porous as a bench gets. The NPS note covers wooden or ivory handles with clear polyethylene sheeting while the metal gets cleaned.

My opinion: on a bag, the simplest shield is a slip of thin card or plastic cut with a slot and slid under the hardware so the brass sits on it and the leather sits behind it. Tape on the shield, never on the grain. Work the polish onto the cloth, not onto the brass, so there’s nothing loose to run. Where a handle comes off, take it off. I set my handles on Chicago screws. Hardware on a bench is easier to polish than hardware on a bag.

Wear gloves. CCI says clean cotton gloves keep the moisture, salts and oils in your fingers off freshly cleaned metal. The NPS note prefers nitrile.

Then the corners. CCI says old polish residue shows up as grey, white or green deposits in places that are hard to reach, and the GSA procedure warns that liquid cleaners leave residue that builds up in joints and carved areas. Both reach for a wooden point: a toothpick in CCI’s case, an orangewood stick in GSA’s. Run it around the base of every post and rivet head. Whatever stays there sits against the leather for years.

Wax it and stop

A thin coat on the metal buys time. Fingers and air do the rest.

After polishing, conservators wax. CCI mixes a bleached microcrystalline paste wax with a mineral solvent, wipes it on, lets the solvent go, buffs it, and leaves a thin layer on the metal. It won’t warm the wax on metal attached to wood, ivory or other heat-sensitive materials. In my view leather belongs on that list. On the forum, Kowboyboots wipes on carnauba car wax after polishing and reckons it keeps moisture and hand oils off the brass for about a year.

Wax on the metal also helps the leather. A waxed buckle tongue tarnishes slower, and every time you don’t have to polish it is a time the leather around it doesn’t get a rag dragged across it.

Then condition the leather near the hardware, because whatever you did, some of it reached the grain. My leather care page says cleaners take out dirt and oil both, so feed the leather afterwards. I use beef tallow and leather oil. Wilson’s advice to Berreth was the same in spirit: pull the buckles back now and then, and condition the leather around them.

Now the argument against polishing at all

Tarnish is the brass doing what the leather does. I can’t praise one and scrub off the other.

A well-carried leather briefcase with naturally tarnished brass hardware left unpolished.

Here’s where my own argument breaks.

This site has argued again and again that the darkening of a bridle case is the good part. The post on patina puts it in the title: a record, not a flaw. Then I turn around and want the brass on that same case bright as the day it left the bench. That doesn’t hold up. The brass is tarnishing for the same reasons the leather is darkening: air, hands, time, use.

The conservators don’t polish by reflex either. CCI’s first question is whether the object should look polished at all, and its default when in doubt is to clean without polishing. Then it gives the reason: “Repeated polishing results in loss of surface detail.” Every polish takes a little metal with it. On a lock plate with an edge or a stamped mark, that adds up.

Plating makes it worse. The why-brass post says much gold-colored hardware is plated zinc, and that once wear shows the dull metal underneath, no polish brings it back. My own locks carry palladium over solid brass. My opinion: that thin bright skin is the first thing an abrasive rag wears through, so anything plated should never see polish with grit in it. Wipe it with a soft cloth and leave it. The GSA’s magnet test helps here only in part. A magnet won’t stick to solid brass, and it will stick to steel under brass plating. In my view it tells you nothing you can trust about plated zinc.

And some hardware is already sealed. GSA says lacquered brass usually lasts about ten years without frequent polishing, and that ammonia-based cleaners damage the lacquer. On the buckle discoloration thread, members suggest lacquering a buckle to stop it marking leather, and one of them, TXAG, says the lacquer will wear off eventually. Of course it will. Everything on a bag wears off eventually.

So I’m left with this, and I’ll call it my opinion. On a new case, keep the brass bright if it makes you happy, and do it the slow way above. On a case that has been carried for years, think hard before you touch it, because the honey-brown brass and the dark leather around it got there together, and the argument over original versus restored is the same argument at auction prices. A bright buckle on a twenty-year-old bag looks like a new tooth in an old jaw.

Brasso Multi-Purpose Metal Polish for Brass & Chrome: A liquid metal polish for brass and chrome. See it on Amazon (affiliate link).

Simichrome All Metal Polish, 1.76 oz: A paste metal polish in a 1.76 oz tube. 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

You Might Also Like

Similar Posts

Leave a Reply