Stiching Horse

This stiching horse is for holding pieces of leather while sewing them together.   It clamps the pieces together in the correct alignment so you can easily sew a seam.  

When the stich horse was about 5 years old, I was preparing to do some stitching and as I pried the clamp jaws apart to insert the work piece, one of the jaws popped off the swivel base.   Well that was embarrasing!   So I cleaned up the joint and reglued it.   After the glue set, I drilled two 1/4" holes through the clamp jaws and swivel base, then added two 1/4-20 flat head bolts with tee nuts so this would never happen again.  

Parts of the stiching horse.   The vertical pieces are 3" wide and 1/2" thick pine.   Notice I have glued a 1" block to the top of each vertical side, but I haven't sawed the profile yet.

Top of vertical before sawing curved top profile.

7/8" by 1/4" deep counter bore under bottom for vertical 3/8" carrige bolt head.

The bottom's profile.   This was a 1x6, I sawed it down to 1/2" thick on each end, leaving a 3-1/2" wide pedestal in the center then rounded the corners, and sanded it.

Top of clamp after sawing and sanding profile.

Pry-block opening jaws.

Parts of stich horse after painting.

Finished Stiching Horse.

Heres how you use it, sitting down on top of the base with the clamp coming up between your legs, so the clamped piece(s) are right in front of you.

The stich horse was about 5 years old and one day when I was using it one of the clamp sides popped off the swivel base.   So I glued it back on and added two 1/4-20 bolts and tee nuts to keep that from ever happening again.   Here you can see the heads of the two 1/4-20 bolts.

Closer look at the heads of the 1/4-20 bolts.

The tee nuts on the other side.

And a quarter look at the base.