Are you interested in buying a case Justin? All the information about me and my shop is here, www.jbcases.com/aboutus.html
I would love to tell you I got super wealthy and am posting from my island cabana on Maldives while my elves sprinkle pixie dust on leather and cases spring up like mushrooms.
But that is only a dream I have each night then I wake up and prepare to go to the shop each morning. When I am in the shop I spend my time working on, tweaking, and designing about 40 ongoing orders. We seem to stay right about 40 custom orders in line right currently. In addition I am always researching new methods and testing those out.
That nice little case you see above with the ball in the lid......we went through about six variations of that one before I was happy with how it works and functions. That's what I do in my shop.
I don't tool and I don't know where you might have gotten the idea that I ever did the tooling on our cases. I can tool a little but I have no patience for it. It requires a lot of concentration and attention to detail when working and any little slip up can ruin a whole piece. I can't sit down for a long time and work on something that meticulous. I'd much rather tinker with ways to use leather creatively and ways to improve how cases work and protect cues.
In my opinion, and this is only because I personally have not yet seen any better, we are currently the best in the world at making custom BUILT cases. And all that customization comes out of my head, through my hands and into reality through my staff.
Notice I did not say custom-decorated.
Because to me beauty is so subjective. There are many great toolers and artists putting their work on leather cases that we could not say we were the best even if we had the world's number one tooler working on our cases. And who that would be is always debatable anyway.
So what I focus on for my work is the construction. Tons of little details, some visible and most invisible that combine to create a case that is solid and durable and intended to protect cues for many lifetimes.
For the decoration I am more of an art director than artist. For example, this case has so much thought put into it that you probably can find something you missed every time you view it.
I didn't tool it but the whole design was mine and I practically invented several new methods of case making just for this case. It's not just about the amount of tooling, who exactly is doing the tooling or the depth of tooling. In my opinion you have to look much deeper than that when judging the art of decoration.
But all that said, I can work leather a little bit too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz0rnEXSZ2A
Hope this helps you and looking forward to your order very soon.
