Leather for outsoles, midsoles, insoles, heels, and top lifts uses different tannages, often oak-bark-based. It is also usually tanned as bends, rather than as sides. Relatively few tanneries produce sole leather, and tanneries that do often specialize in it exclusively.
I don’t know who tans it but I got my sole bend from Zack White. I know Montana, Tandy, and many of those types supply it. Maybe they’re from WYNY.
Splenda (Spain?) makes their own, and Lee Miller seems to have switched to using their sole bends
If we get a couple dozen friends together we can get a good deal on 500kg of turkish sole bends
Ok sure happy to do that if you’re ok with it!
Also not sure what to do with this but Lawrence aka u/flyingmonkleather put together a nice list of suppliers, you should chat with him to see if he’d be ok with using the list out of context, but he posts this link openly on reddit so here ya go
More than OK! And feel free to make your own posts with any lists or notes you’d like help improving.
My whole hope moving bits of https://shoemaking.wiki over to posts on this forum was to make it easier for other folks to edit, encourage others to share, and stir up discussion to get this forum going.
I’m not sure I’d want to sign up to maintain a list of distributors including small-goods- and saddle-focused ones. There are just too many, they come and go, and a lot of them carry a lot of the same products.
I do think it’s worth it to me personally to track specialist shoe findings distributors, since there aren’t that many and they tend to carry things the leathercraft shops don’t. And to point out distributors for particular suppliers, like who distributes a particular sole tannery’s leather.
Other folks might be inspired to keep up other lists. They’re more than welcome to do that here on the forum, or share links here on the forum to resources elsewhere.
Ok I think I’m getting a better idea of what you’re aiming for. I’ll try to be helpful where i can. I’ve been reading and keeping lists but i haven’t done much yet. Now you just need some traffic!
If it’s good for shoemakers and shoemaking, I’m almost certainly going to be happy to have it here.
Really what I’m seeing is that a lot of good information and support is getting repeated over and over because it’s hidden in private, going stale when people can’t help update it, or just not getting shared in the first place.
Things were better when DW and the Crispin Colloquy were still alive and kickin’, but that’s ground near to a halt for a variety of reasons. I’d like to get something like that going again, without the constraints about being “too commercial”. I suspect sharing notes and offering some good reference materials could encourage more folks to sign up and chime in.
Yes I definitely agree with your premise that the old school forum style with a wiki is the best way to solve the disorganized abundant knowledge problem. I’m glad you’re motivated enough to do it! Next challenge will just be being enough momentum with visibility membership and participation. I think putting together a high quality complete and useful wiki is probably the best first step