Electric Horsehair Brush for Leather Care

[michaelleung9447]

Hi folks,

Thought I'd share an interesting horse hair brushing “technique” I picked up from some Chinese social media posts, effectively what an electric toothbrush is to a regular toothbrush: a specialized horsehair brush that could attach to an electric drill:

Now I know what your first reaction might be and that’s my concern as well: would it ruin the leather?

As I valued more of my leather jackets and shoes than my own skin, I actually tried it on my own skin first.

As it turns out, as long as you set the speed to a reasonable level, this thing is no different than a manual brushing: there’s no sharp scratching feeling on my skin and no scratch marks (the kind you’d have scratching with nails) on my skin; at the same time, the shape and the way it moves actually makes cleaning easier especially at the seams or some tricky spots.

Now naturally you got what you pay for: the horse hair is not really uniformly distributed, with some sticking out more than the others and look a bit messy. I do wish there’s a premium version of brushes like this I can buy, but sadly I only was able to find it at Chinese e-commerce websites.

Thought I’d share this interesting technique with you all in case it helps.

 

[michaelleung9447]

How to clean it easily ?

Do you mean how it cleans easier than regular horsehair brush? One example is armpit area and collars: with regular horsehair brush it’s not that easy to clean it thoroughly, with this one I can just put it in the position, hold it and move it a bit, and the jobs done.

If you meant cleaning the brush itself, I’d imagine it’d be similar to a regular brush.

 

[Monitor]

This is the first thing I tried when I finally bought my own drill. Such fuzzy drill bits have been around forever, I'm sure they got their purpose and although it makes sense they would work on leather, for some reason, they don't. Not very well, at least. The result is nowhere near as good as done by hand & with a decent brush.

I even tried attaching a brush to an orbital sander and while the results were better, the outcome was definitely not worth the effort.

 

[michaelleung9447]

This is the first thing I tried when I finally bought my own drill. Such fuzzy drill bits have been around forever, I'm sure they got their purpose and although it makes sense they would work on leather, for some reason, they don't. Not very well, at least. The result is nowhere near as good as done by hand & with a decent brush.

I even tried attaching a brush to an orbital sander and while the results were better, the outcome was definitely not worth the effort.

An orbital sander! Now that’s on a whole different level…

I’m actually a bit curious as to the difference you noticed, as a guy who just got into the leather world, it’s not immediately obvious to me as to what the difference was: I thought it’s just for cleaning the dusts that got into the seams or even the micro holes of the leather fiber, do you mean things other than that such as polishing?

 

[Zoro]

To me this sounds like something that could be useful for someone with some kind of disability that would not allow them to properly use a brush (although I don't think there's a disability that would cause this yet enable them to use a drill with this accessory).

For someone healthy, I don't think there'll ever be any difference compared to a normal brush.

 

[michaelleung9447]

To me this sounds like something that could be useful for someone with some kind of disability that would not allow them to properly use a brush (although I don't think there's a disability that would cause this yet enable them to use a drill with this accessory).

For someone healthy, I don't think there'll ever be any difference compared to a normal brush.

Well that’s why I say this is basically electric tooth brush to regular tooth brush: you don’t really need to use electric toothbrush, but it does achieve much better cleanliness with much less effort.

 

[Trouser Bark]

I have cotton wheels for a drill motor and bought them at Home Depot,’a hardware store in the US.