Welcome to Chester Belter

Instead of first showing you what I'm making, I felt I should show you why I work leather.

I picked this up recently on holiday. It's a John Rabone & Sons leather cased 100Ft cloth tape measure.
From what I've since been able to establish it's been around for 50 or a lot more years.
It's beaten up and it's even missing it's first 54Ft of measure.
It does however exude a quality of engineering and craftsmanship of materials that's sadly not attributed now to what's mostly a disposable, short measure plastic item picked up near the till.

With my blog I'll be showing some of the design process behind the Chester Belter pieces I'm making now and what's planned ahead. Some will be new but some will also hopefully echo some old memories.
I doubt I'll either be able to suppress quite a few motorcycle, cycle and any other forms of auto design along the way.