Purchased a bell skiver recently and I went through the whole process of sharpening and tuning the machine. Tension on the belt seems good and smooth - I can press down and start the motor gradually towards full speed and it's running smoothly. I'm able to easily skive small pieces of leather down to 0.4mm without too many issues but when I try to do an entire split skive using the entire 2 inches of the blade the machine starts making a lot of squeaky sounds. I'm currently trying to skive some simple veg tan (buttero/pueblo) from 1.2mm to around 0.6mm and the tension doesn't feel great when I try to skive 2 inches width. I have to help the feed roller along and there's a ton of squeaking on the belt -- too little power, leather ends up getting stuck, too much and the leather just rips through. Is this a problem with the blade not being sharp enough? Height and distance of the foot was tested on a smaller scrap piece so that should be fine. Is the distance between the feed roller and the blade too close? Is the tension on the belt a problem? I'm not sure where to start or how to test for these things.
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Likely reasons:
- Too much width is being split at once
- Leather is too firm (especially for the width of the split)
- Too much thickness is being removed on each pass
Splitting two inches of veg tan is impressive. These machines are not really meant to split at all and they work best on chrome tanned leather. So you have a good machine there!
Try using a smaller presser foot, or overlapping every inch or so, especially if you're not using soft skins.
Also, make sure you aren't trying to remove too much thickness at once, sometimes you will need several passes to reduce the thickness. I.e. starting with 2mm hide, take that down to 1.5mm, then 1mm, and finally 0.4mm.
You can sometimes get away with removing more thickness per pass, but it's dependant on the leather, so test on scrap if need be.
i met similar issue when i tried on some kind of sheep hide,
you can try this out:
not split to thickness you want once, do it gradually, skiv from 1.2 to 1 then from 1 to 0.8, and so on
plastic feed roller might work not welll than stone one when dealing with smooth hide.