Quote:
Originally Posted by Uncle Brad
Nice work!
I think you may have just save me a lot of pain with an issue i have with a used replacement shifter i bought.
Can you elaborate on the leather molding/stretching and just how you got the white portion applied to the shifter?
I'm also curious as to how hard the silver portion of the shifter was to remove.
Cheers!
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The silver piece is a bit snug at first, but it's just a press fit, so comes off easy enough. You want to pull it out on a 45 degree angle, not straight up or back.
To mold leather around curved pieces, I first get a dish sponge and run it under hot water, then ring it out and hold it against the raw side of the leather for about 1 minute. The heat and moisture softes the leather slightly. Then I just gently pull and stretch the leather with my thumbs to stretch it out where needed to achieve the proper curve. You can also pull and stretch it over the piece, though I find stretching it by hand is quicker and more effective.
Edit: a little more detail...
Once the piece of leather was stretched over the silver piece, I traced a line around the perimeter of the silver piece onto the back raw face of the leather to mark where the leather would wrap around the edge. I then used a Dremel with drum sander to thin or "skive" that perimeter line until the leather was only about half of it original thickness there. This makes it much easier to wrap around the edge of the silver insert. The leather was then trimmed to size (1 cm overlap) and the overlap was feathered and tacked to the backside with contact cement, similar to this:
