Tanning

[Oresai]

Part One.

This is a thread on home tanning, not the lying in the sun turning brown kind, but tanning animal skins to make furs, sheepskins, etc.
First, get your hide! For folks living in the countryside this can be easier than in the city. Many farmers here in Britain home butcher and if you ask nicely, will be quite happy to give you their sheep, cow or pigskin. For city folks, seek out your nearest slaughterhouse, and ask about their own skins. Most of these go straight to industrial tanners for the leather industry but they will sell you one or two, usually very cheaply, a couple of pounds for a sheepskin. You will have to choose your own and get it home yourself though, I don`t suggest carting it home on the bus.
It is important, if you don`t plan on processing the hide immediately, to properly store the hide as they will begin to degrade almost immediately.
The easiest way to do this is by freezing, so if you have a chest freezer, store the hide, hair side in so the flesh is turned out, in a double wrapping of plastic in the freezer.
Another way of storing hides is by salting. Ordinary table salt can be used but you do need vast quantities even for a single sheepskin, so get to your local hardware store and buy a couple of sacks of rock salt used for de icing roads and paths in winter. It does the same job, which is to dry out the moisture on the flesh side of the skin.
Lay the skin flesh side up on a pallet or thick plastic sheet. Sprinkle enough salt on it, covering to about a half inch depth. Leave overnight. Next day add more salt, much of what you put on the previous night will have dissolved and ran off the skin.
Repeat this procedure until you find the salt no longer dissolves, then add even more salt and carefully fold the hide in half. Leave as is, but check at least once a week. The skin should harden off, if any moist areas remain, add more salt as needed.
Do NOT freeze skins which have been salted.
And before you use either of these skins, the frozen one must be thoroughly defrosted and the salted one must be washed in many changes of clean, warm water until the flesh side is once again plump, wet and soft.

[Oresai]

P.S if anyone wants any info on humanely despatching an animal for meat or in an emergency, to put out of pain, just ask.

[Skandi]

Keep these coming, I would love to have a go at it. The last skin I got I unfortunately had to dispose off as I had no room to store it until I was free the freezer space was dedicated to the meat!

[Oresai]

Once the skin is thawed/rehydrated, you start to process it.
For something the size of a sheepskin, the following is needed if you don`t use industrial tools...
a tree trunk or solid table on which to work.
A dull edged blade..the proper tool is a scraper, which is slightly curved and has two blades, both dulled, with handles on either side, but any blade can be used so long as it isn`t too sharp.
That`s it.
You position the skin, flesh side up, over the trunk, trapping the end of it with your body, leaning into the trunk and skin. It has to be held fairly firm or the blade will slide all over the place and you may hole the skin.
Wear rubber gloves.
Each and every skin has a membrane on the flesh side of it called a `vel`. This must be removed or the tanning liquor won`t penetrate the flesh.
In a rabbit skin it can be seen more easily...it`s thin, see through and kind of slimy, but if you snag a bit of it and lift it up, and pull, it comes away easily.
That doesn`t happen in any larger mammal, which is why you have to scrape it off.
Using firm, easy motions, push the scraper down the skin....you should see edges of the vel roll up and be pushed away from you.
You can help this along using your fingers from time to time, pulling on the rough edges of any bits of vel you see.
Be careful not to hole the skin, but if you do don`t panic, it can be patched and sanded after the tanning process.
How much work you put into it is up to you..the more vel you remove the easier the hide tans and the less work you have to do at the sanding/working stage.
Remove any lumps of fat or meat with a good sharp knife, sliding the blade under an edge of the lump then turning it flat, away from you and sliding the meat or fat off. I use a sharp bladed fish filletting knife for this, it`s the best I`ve found (Victorinox) and never lets me down. For any butchering I do, I have a hooked skinning knife.
Removing the vel is a labour intensive job, especially on a big hide, but keep going at it, it`s an important stage and the better you do it, the better the end result will be.
Once the vel is removed, you`re ready to degrease the skin.

[Oresai]

In my work, I use chemical degreasants, but you can do a good enough job by washing the skin in a strong solution of cheap washing detergent. Try to get the old fashioned, blitzes-every-stain-going kind, not the high tech wash at thirty degrees and is kind to your clothes kind. You really want something pretty tough, that will cut through the remaining skin fats and dissolve it.
If you aren`t squeamish or precious about your kitchen or washing machine, throw it into that, on a wool wash, having first put a good big cupful of washing powder into the drum.
If you don`t want to risk your washing machine (though if you use it for this, a simple empty wash afterwards on the hottest cycle cleans the machine fine ) then you`ll have to wash it by hand.
In a tub, or bath, put plenty lukewarm water, not too hot and not cold, and add double the amount of washing powder you`d need in the machine.
Dissolve it and add the skin, depending on how mucky the skin is, sets how long you`ll need to wash it.
Don`t scrub or rub the wool or hair, just swish it around in the water, gently pressing and agitating the worst stained bits. Blood especially needs a gentle hand to get out.
Leaving it in the bath, empty the water out and rinse well in more lukewarm water.
If you`ve used the automatic washing machine, the whole thing has been washed and spun for you.
If you did it in the bath, you`ll have to gently squeeze out the excess water and transfer it to another tub to carry out to where you`ll tan the skin. Wet skins bigger than dog size weigh pretty heavily when wet. Mind your back!

Once it`s washed, it`s ready to be pickled.
Pickle is an acidic solution applied to the skin, in order to prevent bacteria acting on it and slow down natural decay, and also plumps up the flesh, like opening grain in wood, to allow the tanning liquor to be more readily absorbed.
You can purchase bulk bags of citric acid for this purpose from food stores.
The general solution is one pound of salt to one gallon of water, and add citric acid by the cupful until it reaches a PH of 1.5.
To find the PH value, you can buy strips of paper from any chemist used by diabetics. Simply dip one strip in the solution for the PH value.
If you make up enough, either in the bath or a large tub (try old propcorn barrels if you live in the countryside, any farmer will give you one, or an old rainbarrel) then simply place the skin into this solution and leave for twenty four hours.