Outseaming
There are one or two spots where I didn’t get it just right, but overall I was surprisingly happy with this round.
On my first original pair, and on some of the factory shoes I converted to handwelt, I set the outseam stitches way too far out from the featherline. I was trying to avoid that this time, and I think I did. I probably could have gone even closer.
I marked the holes with a saddle-style overstitch wheel, 6 stitches per inch. I then made a small mistake by dotting each of those prick marks with a silver gel pen, instead of a scratch awl or a bone folder, to make them more visible. That left me with little dots all along my welt that I now need to dye over.
Making Pegs
I think it’s totally possible to make pegs yourself. I did another round of it last night. The big caveat is that it’s fiddly, time-consuming work.
Really going at it for an hour or so, I wound up using the small chisel just to split the slats into little sticks. From there, I quit using the chisel and pencil sharpener and just went at it with a utility blade. It actually helped with splitting when the blade dulled a bit.
I checked my notes on what sizes of pegs people used, and cross-referenced that to Blau Ring size chart—and converted them to a wiki page here on the forum—to get more specific about the dimensions I should go for. The upshot was that most sources I have seem to like a little over 2mm wide through the outsole and a little under 3mm for heel lifts. If I make them all 1 inch long to start, I can always trim them down shorter before use.