Vintage Baseball Glove Forum

I'm getting ready to relace a glove and wondered what's the best prep work for laces. Do you lace a glove dry, soak laces in water, or any other method to soften up laces?

I have very little experience lacing gloves so any advice or suggestions would be appreciated.

I, too, have very little experience, but from the few gloves I have re-laced, I think a lot of it depends on your laces. The less expensive thin laces that come in the plastic covered relacing kits seem to be dry and brittle straight out of the package. The Louisville Slugger laces I have used that are sold as individual units and not encased in plastic seem to be more pliable and need less conditioning.

I am re-doing (customizing) an old Rawlings OR 520 with chocolate brown Louisville Slugger laces. I have a second, identical glove that I took apart to follow the laces pattern. ... I should have written notes. When I replace the laces in the second glove, I am going to use some of the cheaper laces from the kits I have purchased. I am going to:

1. coat them in a thin layer of Vaseline.
2. hang them straight with a weight of some kind clipped to the end to gently stretch them.
3. roll and re-roll them around the end of an old bat to soften them slightly.

Hopefully, that will make the new laces more pliable and easier to work with, without reducing their strength.

Is it a trick of my imagination or are glove laces of different thickness and width? Anyway, are there recommended width and thickness for glove laces? What about the length?

I've seen leather laces at my local shoemaker's but they didn't seem to match those of the glove I intend to relace completely (a Rawlings PG30 Reggie Jackson), so tomorrow I'm going back there, this time with the glove in my bag, to see if I can get something that could come a little close to what I'm looking for. I don't want to buy the wrong stuff.

... lots of different thicknesses. It is kind of a trade-off situation. The thinner laces may not be as durable, but the thicker laces are really difficult to work with when relacing a glove.