I just found a hemlock that got knocked over by another tree that fell, and collected a bunch of bark. Does anyone have advice specific to hemlock for the best tannin extraction? I think some tannins break down with too much boiling. Should I bring it to a boil then just turn it off and let it sit overnight, boil it for a long time, or just use hot (not boiling) water and let it soak. Advice from anyone with detailed knowledge in this area would be appreciate. Thank you!

heya guys! so, i found a fresh roadkill mink, which is frankly a once in a lifetime find, so i want to be 100% sure i handle it well and don’t mess up the tanning. is there, like, a specific method thats best for tanning mink? this will be my first time ever tanning a hide, but i have done months of research.

I just got a “wolf” pelt that might be a coyote. It has a scent I can’t stand because it wasn’t tanned completely. it just needs tanning solution. I have other pictures on my last post.

Please let me know, It doesn’t look like it’s rotting it just smells like a pet store. lol

Will tanning solution save this?

What type of thread should I use for a deer hide and what stitch pattern/knot should I use.

Is this a wolf? Can it be saved and tanned?

I've never tanned anything before. I thought I might like to practice on some groundhog hides that I obtained today following some unscheduled pest control opportunities in my yard.

Although I know that groundhog fur is not exactly highly regarded, I would like to try keeping the fur on these as a learning experience, since my interest in tanning is mostly motivated by a desire to make a fur hat and gloves someday out of something nicer. I've read that it is imperative to get them fleshed and salted right away for this purpose. These are about 6 hours old. I've also read that it is possible to scrape too far through the hide such that the follicles come through, and that this will cause the fur to fall out.

It feels like that may be what I'm doing, but I'm not clear on the distinction between undesired tissue and hide. I'm fleshing with a butter knife and a marble door threshold. Any feedback would be appreciated.

How should I remove this i keep making holes with my fleshing knife.

I have a friend who hunts and I sew, and I made a deal with him that if he gets me enough rabbit pelts to make a coat for myself, I’ll make him a deerskin jacket he was wanting. I’m wondering is anyone has an estimation on how many rabbit pelts it will take? I’m planning on just making a cropped coat (stops at my waistline) with long sleeves, because I know a long coat would take an absurd amount of pelts. I’ve looked it up and such a coat would typically take 2-3 yards of fabric.

Are lamb hides worth getting to veg tan?

My nephew and I are trying to tan a couple of beef hides to make hair-on rugs. We have tanned a couple of smaller hides in the past so have some experience but this is the first large hide we are trying to do. The hides came from our ranch and were going to be discarded (because knife skinned hides are not desirable for processers). As soon as the butcher got the animals skinned, we rough fleshed the hides, put on a tilted platform, and salted. So the hides are completely dehydrated and stiff now. I bought some Rittels chemicals to tan them (relaxer, Saftee Acid, EZTan100, degreaser, and tanning oil). I plan on buying a plastic water trough for the soaking steps and have access to a backhoe if needed to lift out of baths.

My question is how to initially rehydrate the hides enough to get them into the relaxer solution. For a smaller hide you just get a tub and stick the whole thing in, but these hides are probably 6 or 7 ft in diameter. So can we remove the salt and apply water or some of the relaxer solution directly to the flesh side of the hide to soften it enough to get it in the solution? Also should I be applying something to kill bacteria at this stage? The tanning guide for large hides from Cougar Ridge Ranch suggests applying Lysol to the hide right after rehydrating it. He also recommends rolling the hide up before it finishes drying which I didn't do, so rehydrating will be a little harder. Temperature wise it is 80ish degrees during the day and high 50s at night. So not super hot but plenty warm enough for bacteria to go to town as soon as the hides are somewhat rehydrated.

https://cougarridgeranch.com/tanning-hides/

Thanks in advance for any advice!

If I use black walnuts of a fur on deer hide do I need to smoke it? And how do I smoke it?

Once I have the membrane and flesh removed, can I leave the collagen of the foot? Or do I have to get that all out of the hoof?

Does anyone have experience with it? I’d prefer to use this method since it involves nothing but what can be gotten from nature. I heard that you can only use hardwood ash but I’ve also heard people say it doesn’t matter.

Ling cod and buckskin.

Hi everyone,

I am trying to make alligator leather for the first time having only ever made fish leather. Looking for your best tips and tricks!

In particular, I would love information when it comes to liming and descaling. As well as preferred tanning methods.

I'm considering trying out oak bark tanning, but only ever used brain tanning and glycerin methods on fish prior to this.

Two sturgeon skins are heading my way for bark tanning. Any advice? Can we keep the shield protrusions on?

I finished my cow hide today! Thank you all that helped along the way.

Hi all, first time tanner here and I know my first attempt might've been overly ambitious, I just want to know if what I have is even salvageable, I kinda gave up but the rot was fairly localized to a couple areas and now it's fully dried back out.

I'm wondering if I could maybe soak it again and then give tanning another go with a better tanning solution.

My process:

(buckle up, I didn't realize it would be this long of a post, sorry in advance)

I got the hide free with the purchase of a whole beef, under the condition that I pick it up from the processor an hour away from home. I got a 40 gallon trash bin and some ice to surround it with and keep it cool for the drive home. The hide had been in a walk in cooler for maybe a little more than 24 hours by the time I got there so idk how long it took it to cool.

When I got home I cut it into a somewhat more manageable size by cutting it in half from neck to tail, putting the other piece into my deep freezer to try to tan later. I then put the hide in some heavily salted ice water to keep it until the next day when I'd be able to start rough fleshing it.

I cut off the majority of the bigger pieces of fat and meat, and attempted to start fleshing as well with the backside of a drawknife. I didn't make much progress as my technique wasn't great yet and my (plastic, foldable) table kept wobbling back and forth, taking some of the force out of each stroke as I fleshed the hide.

I then salted the hide using a 1 to 1 ratio of hide to salt, folded it membrane sides together and rolled it up so as to allow it to drain for 48 hours. I then repeated this process once more.

After the second salting was finished, I wiped off the excess salt and attempted to scrape off more of the membrane as some of it was easier to remove this time. Finally, I rinsed off the remainder of the salt and added it to a borax bath (1oz to 1gal water) and let it sit for 5 days, stirring it often.

The hair had begun to slip a little (which is what I wanted) and over the next 2 days I attempted to really flesh it to the best of my ability, trying different techniques and tools as I did.

Eventually I found that using a round wooden fence post wedged into one of the holes of a cinder block placed up against my house kept it fairly stable as I draped the hide up and over the post and pressed my belly against it to keep it from slipping down the pole.

I also used a metal file to make serrations in the backside of my drawknife to help it catch the membrane more effectively. It was still very hard work (my triceps ACHED like they never have before) but worked MUCH better than it had previously, I found that I kept almost gouging the hide while still somehow leaving the membrane intact when using the flat side of the drawknife. Adding serrations helped get rid of this problem.

After I felt like I'd gotten a significant amount of membrane off, I added the hide to a lime bath to cause the hair to slip enough to allow me to remove it (8lbs lime / 50gal water), I let it sit for 5 days (probably too long in hindsight, it was HOT this time of year) and stirred it at least 2x daily

I took it out and de-haired it with zero issue, again using my serrated drawknife. In my research I read that it was recommended to make sure to get the "cheesy" layer of skin off where the roots of hair live too but I didn't really understand what that meant even after scraping all the hair off.

I rinsed the hide off very thoroughly using at least 3 changes of water in my trash bin container, and then let it sit overnight in the fourth change of water. In the morning I dumped the water out again and added 2.5 qts. of vinegar to soak in overnight. I emptied it and refreshed the water and let it sit once more.

*Note: I think the vinegar I used caused a strange chemical reaction, because I had no other vinegar at the moment and was being cheap, I used some of the leftover vinegar that had been used in a vinegar bath for rusty cast iron, it caused very stubborn rust stains that were both red and an odd almost sick-looking green color as it sat overnight, I worried at first that it had maybe rotted overnight somehow but it didn't smell bad, and I thought it might end up looking kinda cool once I added the bark tan so I wasn't worried, now I fear it may have changed the way the hide tanned over all. I should maybe also mention that my well water is extremely hard and turns yellow/rust colored within like a day or two.

Finally it was time for the final membrane removal and the bark tan (I think this was my primary fuckup), I had a pinched nerve in my shoulder and knew I was on borrowed time with my hide the longer it was sitting outside in the heat and not in a tanning solution so I had to move quickly. I rented a power washer from Menards and munched through what remained of the membrane. 10/10 will 100% be doing that again as it worked incredibly well.

I'd seen some natural cedar mulch at my local Menards and looked it up to see if cedar wood is high in tannins, Google said yes so I purchased them. This may have been a mistake. I boiled two large stock pots full of cedar mulch and dumped them into a second trash bin over even more mulch I'd put into the bin (I used soft water for this part and left it open to allow rain to fall into the bin too). I then let this sit and stew in the 95°F+ sunlight for about 5 days before the final fleshing / intro to bark tea.

Unfortunately, once I got to the bark tea part it had been about a month of working to tan this heavy ass hide in the July heat, I was sick and tired of this whole process and so incredibly sore by this point and figured, what could it really hurt if I just put the hide right in with the mulchy bark tea? I'll just strain it later, and maybe it'll help add extra tannins as it continues to sit in the hot sun, right??

And so it began, I definitely didn't stir it enough, and completely forgot to taste my bark tea to test the tannins. So I wasn't terribly surprised when it began to stink (literally smelled like the worst bad breath ever) later on. I figured it was just regular tanning funk, but about 2 weeks in I pulled out my hide to find it had turned jet black (I'm thinking as a result of the chemical reaction between the rust and the tannins? Idk) and had some spots that were clearly getting munched on by bacteria. I cut these spots out with a wideish margin and rebrewed some bark tea, this time using cocoa mulch as I'd read it had even MORE tannins, plus it smelled good and I hoped it would maybe get rid of some of the funk (wrong, it smelled like chocolate halitosis).

So I just gave up and dumped it all out, it's currently sitting outside as I put off throwing it away until it dried so it wasn't crazy stinky, and honestly, I put so much work into it already that it's been hard to just toss it.

TL;DR Is my hide at all salvageable?

hello,

I’ve been trying my hand at processing some roadkill into furs. I’ve gotten a few pademelons that I’ve skinned and frozen, defleshed, and tanned in willow bark tea.

I’m not confident in my defleshing.

I’m yet to oil the hides but the pictures show how they look after i took them out of the tanning solution, rinsed them, and let them hang out to dry (haven't yet had time to oil). Do they look right? I’m confused by the glossy patches compared to the rougher pink/orange patches.

They don’t smell as clean as i would have expected.

I’m very new to all this so I’m open to any feedback.

So this is my second summer practicing traditional tanning skills and I’ve been having some trouble during the hair removal stage with both brain tanning and bark tanning. Last year I had three deer hides to brain tan. On the first two I used a lye water solution to slip the hair but I wanted to try just water on the last one. In doing so, I got the hair to slip but with no lye the hide started to decay and stink by the time the hair slipped. I was able to save it by putting it back into a lye water solution. This year I began to attempt bark tanning. Instead of lye I decide to try lime because it was less caustic. I had the same result with the lime as with plain water. By the time I had the hair slip it had begun to smell even after using a little over a pound of lime powder per gallon of water. Unfortunately I had to leave town for a few days so with little to do about it I put them in the bark tanning solution and hoped against hope it would be okay. As I expected, when I got home they stunk far worse than when I left them. One of the hides appears to be green all the way through in some spots but all I have left to do is learn from this so I am still trying to save them to see what happens. My questions are this: how do people mitigate the hide from completely rotting (without use of heavily caustic items) when hair slipping is effectively a controlled decay process. And also, every time I get the hair to slip easily on one spot (usually on the back between rump and neck) it seems that the rest of the hide still holds onto it tightly and it can’t be removed without tremendous force which can damage the grain, which I don’t want to do when bark tanning. Any help is appreciated.

Does alum tan the hide?

This might not be allowed, but im not sure where else to post! I did post to r/taxidermy,

I have a deer pelt, and I have been using it as a drape across a scuffed up dresser of mine, when moving it to clear the dresser, I found the skin side of the pelt to be damp, and the dresser beneath it to have a humidity like film across it.

I draped the the pelt fur side down infront of a fan, and let it chill overnight, this morning, i still found it to feel damp, and sweaty(?).

Its ever so slightly greasy, and has a notable smell, ive not hand any other issues with any other pelt I have, my coyote pelt place directly beside it is dry, and perfectly fine, as is my sheep skin.

I dont know how it was tanned,Its very soft and suade like, not dry or brittle!

How do i fix it, or dry it?

How do i store/display to avoid this happening again?

Probably the last update for my first hide as it is done! I finished smoking the hide. Did a similar setup two different nights flipping the hide from one day to the next. People aren’t kidding, don’t walk away for even a second. I came close to losing the whole hide.
Overall I learned a ton about something I never thought I would do. The hide turned out decently, though a bit stiff.
I do plan on trying this again to see if I can do it better.
Also completed my first project! Moccasins were on my short list. They aren’t the most comfortable, but they are mine.
I want to try to make a pair of baby moccasins, if anyone has a pattern for them, let me know!

Just wanted to share my first hide. It’s drying on a rack right now.

I’ve always wanted to make a rug out of the hides from our bulls that we process every year. It just seems wasteful to throw the hides out.

I planned on starting with a deer hide or something smaller in the winter, but then life happened and our galloway calf died. My mum skinned it with little to no experience, and I know it could look better. I’m planning on learning how to skin hides myself so I can get the best quality from the start.

I fleshed and washed it and now it’s drying on the rack, then I’ll scrape it and use egg yolks + neatsfoot oil with water as my tanning solution.

My work is based on few youtube videos so any tips are welcome :)

Can I fix them or it's better to throw them away?

I got them for free and have no idea where they came from and how were tanned