My favourite tool

Russell Davis’ skiver machine

‘Sometimes you need to thin a piece of leather by shaving away the thickness from the back of the hide. Imagine a piece of seat piping – it’s a thin strip of leather wrapped over a bit of calico, but you often can’t get a strip long enough from one hide, so you thin the end and wrap it around a new piece to make a join that’s very hard to see. This machine has a rotating edge that shaves the hide back very evenly and precisely.’