Recent content by airspirit

A little late to the party, but I picked up a beaver brand homburg a couple weeks back. At a distance it looks alright, there are some things to note. 1) The stitching on the brim ribbon is horrible and amateurish on every one I handled (went through about 20 of them at Bernie Utz). 2)...

I have my brother's wedding to go to later this month and picked out a nice (if you can call the modern crap "nice" ... went as conservative as I could) suit that screamed HOMBURG to me. After perusing Bernie Utz I picked up a grey homburg that looked nice, but the more I looked at it a couple...

The sweatband on the deluxes is something else: it is soft as velvet. The only problem that I have with the hat at this point is that my head is slightly long oval and the hat seems rounder than the average hat, so it will take some time to adjust to my head, but when it does it will be amazing.

Repost from Dumbjaw's thread per request, Fed 4 Deluxe in Moonstone Grey: Under manmade lights there are brownish highlights to the felt due to the yellow in the bulbs. The lighting was CFL. I went with a modification of Dumbjaw's awesome bash making a C crown necessary due to the...

Sorry about the wait, been scotchgarding the thing and life happened. Without further ado: Under manmade lights there are brownish highlights to the felt due to the yellow in the bulbs. The lighting was CFL. I went with a modification of Dumbjaw's awesome bash making a C crown necessary...

I hate to complain about Hatsdirect because they were so prompt to ship and got it here so quick. I opened my box and found this: Pardon the picture, but of the ones I took this shows it the clearest. This was all over the bottom of the brim all the way around. It looked like grease...

I have a fed 4 deluxe on order that should be arriving early next week. Your crease on that hat is beautiful and if the forums ever allow me to do so, I'm going to be sending a PM to you for a step by step on how to make one just like that because THAT is the crease I want. That aside, you...

Corn starch will pull out some of the surface oils and may make it visibly go away if you're lucky. It will not pull out all of it though, and you'll still have oil rotting in your felt regardless of the initial results which could cause problems down the road.

Water won't take it out. The only way is to break down the oils themselves. Cleaners like naphtha don't make the oils disappear, but rather break them into something water soluble that you can flush out. While I've never done this with felt hats, on my wool navy peacoat I'd dab on small...

I wouldn't be too horribly hasty about getting emails back from them, since they are so far offset in time from us. I've been working with a New Zealand company on some military surplus and I tend to be able to get one email a day in response back since they are only around when I'm sleeping...

I like my Saxon, though the sweatband leaves something to be desired. It is a very hard feeling low quality leather which is a shame because the hat itself is very nice and the dimensions give it a very contemporary look without giving you some stingy brim Justin Timberlake effect.. I could...

I got caught in the rain for the first time today after treating my hat like described above. When I got inside I removed the hat (had been out in heavy rain about 3-4 minutes) to find that all the water had beaded up on it like on a freshly waxed car. I turned it upside down, gave it a shake...

Well, I guess this isn't why I'm an international currency trader: AUD is down to .61 and dropping. $55 Campdrafts anyone?

That is a fine looking hat. I'm not sure I could pull off such a look. I'm curious, is it appropriate to put a crease in the top of that hat? I ask because it is open crown and I'm pretty sure from memory most of those have a crease.

I know this is a bit of a necrobump, but I've been looking at surplus military greatcoats recently myself with this year's turn to winter, and it would appear that all the RAF greatcoats have disappeared. Danish army greatcoats look almost identical with similar buttons but again: all gone. I...