AMan
New in Town
- Messages
- 41
- Location
- Chicago, IL
Hi everyone! I wanted to show off my other jacket mod that I've been working on. This one took me a huge amount of time. I've been working on it since January.
So I found this jacket at a vintage store. It was in bad shape with a lot of cracking. The talon zipper, which was broken, dated the jacket to the late 1940s. I bought it with the plan to restore it.
I spent some time re-dyeing the jacket to hide the cracking. I found a repro Talon zipper on eBay and paid someone to replace it. I then reinforced the cracking with some Klucel G. Of course, I covered it in a ton of Pecard's Antique Leather dressing.
Then I found this image on these forums. Its from one of those japanese jacket books:
Through more searching, I then found one other example of this model:
I thought it was absolutely fantastic, so I decided to modify my Lakeland jacket.
The first step was to find a source for the wool panels. I settled on this vintage melton wool jacket from the 1960s.
The tough part was cutting a straight line to remove the leather panels. That was a nerve wracking process. Here's the first panel done.
The issue was the wool had too big of a nap to properly be glued using leather adhesive. So for the inside side and bottom what I did instead was to sew the panel using an awl and thread to the front leather edge, and then fold that leather edge underneath itself and glue it, thereby hiding and securing the stitches.
Attaching the sleeves and shoulder parts of the panels was far more arduous. Because I needed access to both sides to use the awl, I needed a different method. Plus it was hard to cut the panels out, so the outside edge was uneven.
The only way to do it cleanly was to hand stitch with a needle and thread.
So the sewing required two steps. First, the wool was pulled up and sewn to the raw uneven leather edge with an overcast stitch. This hid the unevenness by making the wool flush with the leather edge. Second, about 1/4 of an inch on the leather side, along the old seam line, I sewed through the lining, the wool, and the leather using a back stitch to reinforce it.
The collar was done in much the same way. Here's a progress pic:
Finally, I added a horsehide pull tab out of the leather from the panels, used the hot water treatment to remove some of the creasing, and covered it again in Pecard's. Final pics coming soon!
I hope you guys enjoyed reading this!
So I found this jacket at a vintage store. It was in bad shape with a lot of cracking. The talon zipper, which was broken, dated the jacket to the late 1940s. I bought it with the plan to restore it.
I spent some time re-dyeing the jacket to hide the cracking. I found a repro Talon zipper on eBay and paid someone to replace it. I then reinforced the cracking with some Klucel G. Of course, I covered it in a ton of Pecard's Antique Leather dressing.
Then I found this image on these forums. Its from one of those japanese jacket books:
Through more searching, I then found one other example of this model:
I thought it was absolutely fantastic, so I decided to modify my Lakeland jacket.
The first step was to find a source for the wool panels. I settled on this vintage melton wool jacket from the 1960s.
The tough part was cutting a straight line to remove the leather panels. That was a nerve wracking process. Here's the first panel done.
The issue was the wool had too big of a nap to properly be glued using leather adhesive. So for the inside side and bottom what I did instead was to sew the panel using an awl and thread to the front leather edge, and then fold that leather edge underneath itself and glue it, thereby hiding and securing the stitches.
Attaching the sleeves and shoulder parts of the panels was far more arduous. Because I needed access to both sides to use the awl, I needed a different method. Plus it was hard to cut the panels out, so the outside edge was uneven.
The only way to do it cleanly was to hand stitch with a needle and thread.
So the sewing required two steps. First, the wool was pulled up and sewn to the raw uneven leather edge with an overcast stitch. This hid the unevenness by making the wool flush with the leather edge. Second, about 1/4 of an inch on the leather side, along the old seam line, I sewed through the lining, the wool, and the leather using a back stitch to reinforce it.
The collar was done in much the same way. Here's a progress pic:
Finally, I added a horsehide pull tab out of the leather from the panels, used the hot water treatment to remove some of the creasing, and covered it again in Pecard's. Final pics coming soon!
I hope you guys enjoyed reading this!
