Musial SM6 Modification

[burker72]

Not sure if anyone can offer advice here, but there's plenty of know-how on this forum, so it is my best bet...

I just bought a Musial SM6 to clean up. The vertical leather strap in the webbing has a notch out of it and I'd like to consider replacing it with rolled lace, ala the famous picture of Mantle holding his glove. However the vertical leather seems to be sewn to the two horizontal pieces of the web. This would appear to prevent me from making this modification (versus the leather strap being laced to the other pieces of the web).

Is there any advice out there?

[BretMan]

Anything that was sewn together can be taken apart.

I've looked at a lot of those H-web gloves and wondered about this myself. You would have to pull the threads out where the strap is sewn in, then use a leather punch to make new holes to accomodate the laces you're adding.

Obviously, you'll have a row of small, empty holes remaining where the old thread was. I'm not sure how noticable those holes would be or how they might affect the final appearance.

[Gloveguy]

Don't know if this would fill the bill for you but after I saw the Mantle picture for the first time when I got the Sport magazine in the 60's I modified my SM6 by folding over as much of the horizontal bar as I could and tightly wrapping a lace around it, tying it off at the bottom of the bar. It looked very much like the Mantle web and functioned well.