This looks easy to reproduce using a Glowforge and, might be an answer to the “what do I do with leather scraps” question I have seen asked:
I have seen some adjacent techniques for making joints between pieces of leather. There are probably some other clever shapes for this waiting to be discovered.
that’s pretty cool. i’m guessing we could figure out the exact shape from reengineering what we can see of that purple link, but it would be even cooler if we could have seen a whole single piece. this is the kind of thing you can buy bags of scrap to make. and those scraps are less expensive per sf than sheets.
That is really cool! I have a lot of leather. Using different colors would be so pretty as well.
The purple piece in this image probably gives sufficient information to knock off this particular shape:
Hehe… reminds me of the bacon explosion… made one once.
Well, that was quick.
Right-click saved-as EvansD2_LeatherLockerTile.svg.
I would expect some interesting patterns to be had by alternating contrasting colors, too.
You can test this with paper pretty easily.
Here’s a quick grid of them for cutting out on an 8.5x11" sheet (or A4, close enough).
Also, the ideal proportions of width and length of these things and how wide to make the slot versus the thickness of the “neck” is just a good starting guess and may depend on how heavy your leather is. I would imagine that tweaking might be needed as you design a piece with these guys, which is why I included the original to have cloned parts so you can tweak and quickly retest.
i was guessing so, too. but i’d still like to have seen the whole piece to be sure.
maybe i’ll play with some of the scraps i have this weekend.
You can see the whole piece by looking at the top and bottom views. This is definitely symmetrical in both X and Y directions.
I like the concept, but the idea of cleaning off the char from that many little pieces of leather kind of makes me blench.
This reminds me of the Joinery project by Clement Zheng. Have you checked that site out? He’s programmed a web based system for creating a number of different laser cut joins (including but not limited to the standard finger joints).
Thanks for sharing that! I think I have heard of this before, but never really looked at it. It seem very similar to Cuttle. Both are quite different, but seem to implemented the same way.
From august ‘21
EDIT: And that points to a post from November '17… this thing has been around for a minute.
Interestingly, never seems to drum up much discussion, I wonder if anyone is using it here.
That is where I saw it the first time. I just never actually looked into it at that time.
Yeah, I knew it had been posted before, but hadn’t seen any mention for a couple years so thought it worth bringing up again.
I feel like we’d seen this before… OK, I kept reading, we did 
I had the same feeling then kept reading and see that we did. I still need to get in and play with Cuttle too
Coming in 2017 I don’t think there were a lot of people with machines at that time. I want to say mine shipped in June 2017 and was one of the early blocks of units shipped.
Thank you for posting this. It has made me rethink what to do with three sides of beautiful dark blue cowhide leather. It’s chrome tanned so not a GF project. I’ve had these pieces for thirty years. My dad was HR for a hshoe factory. When it closed down he got a lot of cool material. I saved these for years.
Three years ago I took them to my farm and didn’t store well. I had a bad mice infestation and I neglected my shouse for a while. A little mildew here and there and lots of mouse dropping’s. I almost threw them away this past weekend but I couldn’t fit them in the car with all the other trash I was pitching. I’ll do my best to reclaim them and turn them into something.
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