drP
Member
- Joined
- Aug 16, 2019
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Thank you, Im glad you like them. The comparison is interesting. In a lot of ways the case that's photographed in this thread is inspired by SAB, but SAB from 40 or 50 years ago. I grew up with stuff of theirs of that era and have a huge amount of respect for it - part of what inspired my interest in leatherwork in the first place. As a result the style is very reminiscent of an SAB or other English case, but our aim was to take the quality and details to the level we felt they should be, so for eg the leather is all JFJ Baker bridle butt (Sedgwick as an alternative), the fittings are all individually hand picked and polished, all the components are made in England and for a case with Brass fittings the fittings and rivets are all solid brass or copper so they last forever without wearing down to steel on the rivets (palladium over brass as an alternative). The point of cases like this is to be largely unlined for longevity and lightness, which ours is, but where the leather has to be thinned down, like the gusset, the address label, areas like that, we fully lined and stitch so there aren't any ugly bits of split leather to touch. We also hand stitch everything, so literally the whole case is hand stitched, not just the handle, burnish rather than paint the edges, etc etc. The result is somthing that's rarther more expensive than a modern SAB, but somthing we're comfortable that all off the ingredients have been selected to last a whole life time or more, and that the price increment is justified to get the quality we wanted to produce
Charlie
I can concur fully, being able to compare the SAB Westminster case with the Equus briefcase “in vivo”...
The Equus briefcase is quite a few levels up in quality compared to the SAB, which is made of heavily pigmented bridle...(but to each his own..) and worth every penny of it, moreover: it has a quality/price ratio which is much higher than that of the SAB case ( and as we all know, “the quality remains long after the price is forgotten”...)
Frankly the quality of the Equus case is as good as it gets, absolutely of a superbe level of cratsmanship.
You might say that Equus is like Aston Martin, and SAB is like Volkswagen...?