About Gill's Custom Leather

Why did you start Gill's Custom Leather?

To show my sons they could start their own business.

They were in their early teens. I wanted them to see, up close and with their hands, that a person can decide to make something, make it well, and sell it — that a business is not a thing other people have. So we set up a bench and started cutting leather.

They worked alongside me, and before long they were not just helping with my projects. They were designing their own and trying to build them. One took to hard materials and made himself a knife and a spoon ring. The other built all sorts of things, and still does. I cannot point to a moment when either of them understood the lesson. I only know I looked up one day and they were designing on their own.

Who taught you leatherwork?

Nobody. I am entirely self-taught in leather, and I started slow.

What I brought to it came from somewhere else. I had done welding and metal fabrication — I make no claim to being a master fabricator — and fabrication teaches a way of working that transfers directly. Measure with a tape. Square things off before you commit. Trust the layout rather than your eye. A leather pattern is a layout, and a sheath that is out of square is out of square forever.

Metal came first. I worked on metal buildings with a good friend, another firefighter. Wood came next and stayed simple: quail cages, chicken coops, and the wooden molds I built for wet-forming leather pouches. Leather was last. The satisfaction turned out to be identical in all three — you make a thing, it is well made, and someone is glad they own it.

What does firefighting have to do with leather?

More than I expected, though not in the way people assume.

I spent my career on a fire department and promoted to Driver — what we called Fire Suppression Technician. What the job taught me is that competence and rank are different things. On a scene, in logistics, in a room with a patient and their family, what mattered was adaptability and knowing a great many things well. Testing well on operating standards proved you had studied. It did not prove you could do the work.

The other thing the job taught me was harder. Firefighting and EMS wear at your humanity. The calls come day in and day out, the same emergencies happening to different people, and it is easy — I watched it happen to good men and women — to stop seeing the person in front of you and start seeing the run. Patient advocacy meant refusing that. It meant deciding, every time, that the person on the floor was somebody's father, and that this was the worst day of their life even if it was an ordinary Tuesday for me.

Nobody checks whether you did that. There is no test for it, and it never shows up in a report. You do it because it is the job.

On the thigh rig I built, I burnished the back — the face that rides against a leg, that no one will ever see. I did not do it because a customer would notice. It is the same instinct. Whether a thing is well made is decided in the places nobody is looking.

I could have chased rank. I chose instead to keep my family together, to keep my wife first, and to raise two men who would surpass anything I managed. That was not a sacrifice. It was the point.

What is this site for?

The gear recommendations here come from a narrow but unusual kind of experience. I never tested a Lesche digger against its competitors. I built leather around one, over and over, which means I know its dimensions, its balance, and exactly where it catches. That is worth something different than a review.

The build videos are on the SouthwestIron channel if you would rather see the pieces than read about them.

And if you want to build one yourself, I would rather hand you the pattern than sell you the sheath.