[The Apprentice]

The Apprentice, some fantastic work there! I especially like the leather tools, I do leatherwork but haven't made shoes yet apart from simple baby shoes.  I'm more into tooling leather but have made leather tankards, belts and a couple of guitar straps.

What 3D CAD do you use? I use Solidworks at work and currently learning FreeCAD which has improved tremendously over the last year.

Thanks, they are a copy of the old tools from Victoriana but altered slightly to imporove the corner cut, the old ones I saw were badly treated so I had to guess the better angle so a shoe welt would fit neatly into the corner and lay level.
Shoe making is actually easier than cobbling because you see the whole construction of the under layers, it takes about a day and a half to make a pair of brouges, so there is not a lot of money in doing it really, and why I only make them for us here and share the knowledge for free, the student doing his own work from start to finish and follows me at the same time.
I do things the older way and make my own waxed threads as well with pug whiskers for needles, the construction is far stronger this way as to the modern methods which use a paper based insole with a canvas rib which soon rot out and are not fully repairable.
The like of Crocket and Jones use the paper method and cost well into the triple hundreds, not really worth what they are asking.
I have used Solidworks from day one and find Solidworks far more user freindly that the new AutoCad 360, I have the training videos as well where you follow the different parameters on a double screen.
There is so much on youtube today and in the newer versions that you cannot go wrong really.