In noticing the pebbled texture they put on Pepsi cans at the time of the Super Bowl, I realized that I had no idea how they give a pebbled texture to the leather panels of an American football. How is this done?
Hamsters ate my first post. Let’s try again. If you’re doing one piece, pebbling is done by bonking a special punch many, many times. If you’re making a lot of US footballs, you feed the leather between two rollers. The top roller has the pebble pattern on it. Football mythology says that early footballs were made of pigskin, which supposedly looks that way naturally.
Wilson’s site makes no mention of the surface of the leather, but today, they’re using cow. “Making a football”
They only say it’s specially tanned. To get the uniformity needed, they’re most likely using an embossed hide - as **AskNott ** said, it involves textured rollers and a lot of pressure. Cow sometimes does come with a pebbly surface naturally, but when someone’s making 5,000 footballs a day, a great deal of predictability is required.
These guys invented the “print” process and “Horween Leather continues to use the same labor-intensive tanning processes created by their ancestors to produce the finest football leather for today’s NFL, college and high school football teams.”
We tooled leather in workshop in high school. As I remember it, the leather is thoroughly wetted and then embossed with a tool having a smooth, round tip. After the leather dries the embossing is permanent and the leather can be softened with a kind of oil.
There isn’t any reason why the process couldn’t be mechanized.