Club Obi Wan

Indiana G wrote:crown height and brim dims are unchanged and are both up to the customer to provide if they want to break away from the standard measurements..... just the block shape has been slightly tweeked. it is very very subtle as i have an ab from steve's old block and an ab from steve's new block.

Fedora wrote:Here is the revised blockshape. Pardon the pics. The first run were too dark and blurry, and this run has too much flash. But, you can see the outline of the hat and that is good. The guy who ordered this hat just wanted a generic Raiders fedora, if you were wondering about which scene it was to emulate. So, this is just my generic Raiders crease job. The hat was only turned slightly, and he wanted the ribbon centered more than being towards the front of the hat. It is a size 7, 5 1/2 tall in the open crown state. Now, it probably looks like any other AB, but there are some nuances going on here, that you may not catch.










I will try and get some outside in better lighting in a few to show it better.

Fedora wrote: The nuances are no secret at all. If you are bored with technical hat stuff, stop reading now!!

The Raiders fedora has a particular radius or curvature where the sides form the crown. This is created by the several things, which I won't go into. Suffice to say, just more than one facet is involved. That area has been tweaked.

Another area is the front and back taper, or lack of it. Overtime, I had changed this area of the block to give reverse taper, that is, a blocked in reverse taper, while this was never present in the film hat. This is one of the caricatures that I had revised into my Raiders blockshape, and for the sake of true accuracy, I must get rid of it. When an original Raiders HJ was creased, in the new state, the back was perfectly straight, and that is what I had to move back to. A blocked in reverse taper creates a hat where the length of the crown on top is longer than the crown at the sweatband. Totally inaccurate, although many fans have insisted upon this in their hats. The film hats bulges, which gives the illusion of a block that had reverse taper.

And finally, the shape of the arc on the creased Raiders fedora when seen from the sides. Many other hats look flattish on the top, when creased the correct depth on the front and back. So, the arc has been tweaked, and like the radius I mentioned earlier, a couple of things are involved in this arc. It is odd how another part of a hat block affects another area, and this presents problems to anyone trying to reverse engineer a block.

What is so funny about this whole deal, at least to me, is after David sent me this latest block from Lamode to block a hat on, a lightbulb came on and I looked and found some pics I had taken of one of my vintage HJ Poets, one made from a stiffer felt, and one that due to this fact, really kept the original blockshape intact. It seems his(our) fresh look at the original Raiders block, and the work that he has had done by Lamode took us right back to the vintage Poet. Sometimes in the heat of the quest, you forget that you used to have a 3 D representation of the block. And in a stiff felt so you can tell better what the hat started out as.

Of course, getting from what you see in that HJ block, to a wood block that you can use is quite a chore, and very time consuming and it ain't cheap which explains why only a few of us have even attempted this. But, it is one of the most important parts that is essential in offering these hats for sale. A good hat stylist, can take a fairly straight sided hat and make it look very similiar to the Raiders fedora, due to his or her ability at molding the felt, but if you are a hatter, the nuances that are missing kicks you in the face. Those are the nuances that I am obsessed with. Fedora

I have two Adventurebit hats that I ordered about two and a half years ago. I am considering getting another one, but I was wondering if anyone had any info on what has evolved in the hats since?

Marc wrote:We introduced the pre-aging, which is a special technique that makes the hat less prone to taper in September 2006.

Regards,

Marc