Now that it's complete, even I'm not sure why I did this in the first place.
The story of the Brill-style holster begins with a retired saddler named Rabensburg who claimed to have created the design for the Texas Rangers in 1907. But he was very young and still an apprentice, and the research team working on The Book puzzled over this notion that he created the Brill from whole cloth with so little experience.
We discovered the King Ranch holster style, which operation was in full swing before 1907; and realized that the Brill had all the elements of the KR but with the excess trimmed off. Recall that the new holster for the Rangers was to be a concealment holster and not a field holster. So it made more sense, that Rabensburg had 'simply' trimmed off everything that didn't look like a Colt SAA in profile.
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Certainly he had retained the welt inside, and the cuff, and the stitched lip; and changed the fold of the belt loop to bring the cuff up to form a narrow belt loop and tilt the grip forward. The cuff wasn't moved; the fold was.
So when I had an opportunity, I acquired a KR and -- cut it down into a Brill. It's not my interpretation; it's actually had a Brill SAA traced onto it and then cut down and reassembled :-). The KR was elegantly made, and disassembly reveals that, like the Brill, the layers have no glue in them and the welt is narrow and hand-stitched.
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And the welt has the curious doubled layer at the muzzle only, just as late-model Rabensburg/Brills have.
Brills are impossibly small compared with the revolver itself. Which explains why copies are always incorrect because, being a so-called 'western' holster, surely it would be big and bulky. But they weren't.
Not sure why I did this :-)
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