I spoke with the curators at SANHS (Springfield Armory National Historic Site) about this, and the moment I mentioned 'leather care' his eyes rolled back. Knowing about Renaissance wax and their efforts to preserve our National Treasure of a firearms collection at SAHNS (BTW; as the National Park Service doesn not have the funding to do so, the effort is currently being assisted by your dollars in the from of a yearly grant from the GCAicon to continue their efforts to preserve the collection housed there ...), I asked what professional curators do in museums to preserve the leather artifacts. He said there is nothing that can be done to stop them from degrading and eventually ALL leather artifacts will change and degrade. I got specific and asked about Pecards and the other leather care products available commercially, and all he would do is reiterate; there is nothing that can be done to stop them from degrading and eventually ALL leather artifacts will change and degrade to nothing but a pile of dust.

Once the cow died the leather started degrading and decomposing. Tanning turned it into a product we could use but it is hardly stable or permanent, and there is nothing that anyone or anything can do. He added that many of not most of the products out there will actually have a negative long term effect and be detrimental. He then stated that the ONLY thing we can do is keep them in as perfectly stable an environment as we can; not too dry not too humid, not too hot, not too cold, and above all; as perfectly stable as we can manage between all these variables.

That is it.

The result for me is that I do not bother trying to 'collect' the leather accoutrements and such - I know that I cannot do anything but watch them go downhill, inexorably.

Sorry if that is not the answer that you want, but my experiences with Pecards have, like Rick's, been wholly and completely unsatisfying. The white stuff never goes away, not here in the midwest, and it is an MF'er to get back off when it shows up.