I was wondering the same thing a few months ago, and found the following post on RSB by Chas Clements (he makes tooled leather cases, among other leather items). It's a long post, but I found it pretty informative:
Chas Nov 19 2002, 10:10 am
Newsgroups: rec.sport.billiard
From: Chas <gryph...@attbi.com> - Find messages by this author
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2002 18:10:52 GMT
It's probably best not to oil leather- unless you're talking about
harness or something that's going to get a lot of direct perspiration
and needs flexibility after drying. The salts and stuff in the
perspiration make the leather dry stiff and prone to crack. The other
thing is that harness can run very thick, and still need to bend
easily- oil makes things sleazy and prone to attract dust out of the
air. People always use too much and end up 'packing' the leather- not
a good idea.
If you do feel the need to oil something, use it **very sparingly**-
drops, and only a few at that. Never use mineral oil/Vaseline- stick
with mink oil, neatsfoot, lanolin and so on.
And never for reptile skins- they aren't 'oily' anyway. Reptile's
don't make good leather, by and large, and don't wear worth a damn.
You're probably best off sealing the hell out of it with an acrylic
and treating it like plastic.
If that is not to your taste; wax the leather with a good neutral shoe
polish, a clean wood wax or Renaissance Wax. Something with a high
carnauba content. Polish it out with panty hose material; stroke in
the direction of the scales/pattern.
You can clean it with Woolite/face soap- don't use 'saddle soap'. Make
a lather in a dish and then clean with the suds. Use as little water
as possible and put on the wax before it dries completely.
It's safe just to ignore it. Clean for hand grease every once in a
while. There are even some proprietary potions for snakeskin boots and
such- you can get them from The Leather Factory, Tandy, shoe supply
wholesalers, maybe some shoe shops. They're pretty much based on
silicone I think. You could probably use something like 'Viscol'; put
on sparingly, allow a week to dry, use two coats (two weeks). The
Viscol will leave it 'dull' in finish, so you're back to waxing it to
get a nice feel and finish.
Hope this helps.
--
Chas Clements
casemaker 303-364-0403
c...@kuntaosilat.net
http://www.kuntaosilat.com/
http://chasclements.tripod.com/index.htm
