Tan-A-Long

[HoBow]

I have had a few people pm me about doing a tan-a-long, so here is my humble attempt.  I will be tanning this hide for the TomB memorial project, while PatB will be turning it into a quiver. 

There are many many ways to tan, I choose the "salt alum" tan because it is an easy method with most of the chemicals needed easy to find.  This will take a few weeks to complete and I will be tanning three hides and some other pieces as I post, so please be patient.  The hides I will be tanning are axis deer.  They are very thin, so they tear easy when cleaning, but tan easier because of how thin they are.  If you have any questions, feel free to ask or pm me.

Pictures:
1- male and female axis deer
2- salt I use.  I have read not to use iodized salt, but I have used iodized and noniodized with no problems.  Perhaps if someone else knows why or have had issues, you could chime in.
3-  You can see I have a few tears near the edge, which will not be a problem for this project as they will be cut off.  I just cut the big chunks of meat off and the rest will come off easier once the salt pulls the moisture out....it took me several hides before I figured this out.
4- This is what the hide looks like from the front. 
5- I start by pouring a pile of salt in the middle
6- Spread the salt out across the entire hide.  Make sure you rub it in the edges really well.  This will help you later.  I will do this twice and in between will take a knife and scrape off the leftover meat and fat.  I leave the salt on there a day or two depending on the humidity level





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[Pat B]

Jeff, this is cool. Thanks for your contribution to Tom's memorial. I'm sure Patrick will really appreciate the effort and gesture.
  Axis deer are cool looking. Where did you get the skins?

[DanaM]

Thanks for taking the time to do this Jeff, wondering what type of alum ya use as here at the plant we liguid alum as a coagulant

[HoBow]

Pat,
I have a buddy who keeps a heard of about 70 and thins them out as needed.  He kills about 20 per year.  He use to throw them out until I asked for them and I have been tanning them ever since.  Anytime I go out to his house, I always make sure I bring my camera and telephoto lense because I can usually get photos.  This time of year, they are not that skittish so they let me get fairly close. 

Dana,
I use powdered aluminum sulfate.  This is the same stuff that you can get at wal-mart for making pickles, but is much cheaper to buy in bulk.  One ounce at Walmart is around $5, while I bought a 50 lb bag for $18.  I could probably do about 100 hides with that amount, but I've made trades for hides and will send enough as this is by far the hardest ingredient to get (and it is easy if you go to the right places.)

[HoBow]

I left the salt on for 2 days.  If you have to leave it longer, it is no problem.
Pictures:

1- This is the knife I use to cut and scrape the meat and fat off.  You know you have left the salt on long enough when you can scrape the edge of the meat and then pull it off with your hands.

2-  This was how much I scraped off

3-  This is the hide mostly cleaned off.  Notice it has shrunk up some, but this is OK.  Eventually, I will pull and stretch the wrinkles out.

4-  I resalted the hide one more time.  I did not salt it as heavy this go round since it was mostly clean.  If there was still quite a bit of fat and meat, I would have added more salt.

5-  This is all the material when I finished.  Some people will pull the meat out and reuse the salt, but the salt is so cheap I never bothered doing that.  I will leave the salt on for another day or two.

At this point, you have rawhide with the hair on.  If you wanted to put it up in storage, make sure you scrapped it well and add some extra salt.  Fold in in half, flesh side to flesh side, and roll it up like a sleeping bag.  Set it up vertically for a few days to let any moisture come out and put it in a paper bag (not plastic, it needs to breath).  I have done this on several hides and had no hair slippage.  If you are making leather without the hair, slippage would not be an issue anyway.


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[Pat B]

This is coming along well.

[HoBow]

Next, you have to wash all the salt off.  I lay it on the gray on spray it with a hose really well for a few minutes.  Now to mix the borax solution.  I use warm water (not hot- you don't want to cook the hide) and mix in Borax until the saturation point (until no more will mix in and settles to the bottom).  Let the hide sit in this solution for about 24 hours.  If it is colder, an extra day or two will not hurt, but no in hot weather as this could cause hair slippage.  Once the hide(s) are in the solution, I weigh them down with rocks or buckets full of water.

Pictures:

1- Wash the hide off well

2- This is the Borax I buy at Wal-Mart.  Some women keep it in the laundry room, so ask.

3- Hides in the solution

4- Hides weighted down

All this step is doing is neutralizing the hide to prepare it to dehair or pickle.

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[HoBow]

I do not have pictures for the next step as I will not be dehairing these hides.  Next hide I dehair, I will post photos of it.  Here are the steps:

You need to prepare an alkali solution to a PH of 12 or 13.  The easiest way to measure this is to buy the paper PH paper strips in my opinion. To increase the PH,  I usually use caustic soda (sodium hydroxide) because that is easy for me to get.  Other chemicals you could use include caustic potash (KOH or potassium hydroxide), lime, lye, or ashes from a fire pit (which is what the Indians used to expedite the process).  You can also use the bark from pine trees, but this process is much slower.  You could also weigh it down in a stream and let nature take its course, but I have never tried this.  I let it sit in this solution for 2-3 days, about double that if the temperature is in the 30's and 40's.  Let it sit until you can take your hand (with a rubber glove) and push the hair off fairly easily.  Most should push off, but you may have to pull the hair out or hit it with a powerwasher (Beware of this as the hair will get everywhere and you will find it for the next 6 months  ) Once you have dehaired the hide, wash well with a hose and neutralize in the borax solution for another day or two.  Now the hide is ready to pickle.

[HoBow]

Now we are pickling the hide.  Pickling the hide prepares it to soak in the tanning solution, or at least that was the way it was explained to me.  Pickling the hide is no different than pickling cucumbers or any other vegetable.  I chose to pickle these hides with vinegar since most would have easy access to this.  You can use anything to bring the PH down between 2 and 3.  I have used sulfuric acid (battery acid), sulfamic acid, and vinegar.  Standard vinegar has a PH of 2.4, which is perfect for the hides.  Apple cider vinegar has a PH of 2.1.  It is probably a few dollars cheaper to use sulfuric acid on a per hide basis, but vinegar is so cheap anyway.  The PH scale is logrythymic (a PH of 2 is 10 times stronger than a PH of 3 and a PH of 3 is 10 times stronger than 4, etc), so make sure the PH stays between 2-3.  I pickle the hides for two days, but monitor them closely.  I have had some hair slippage in this step, but never that bad.

Pictures

1- This is the vinegar I use.  One gallon cost about $2.00 and you can add a half gallon of water and not affect the PH that much, but recheck it. 

2- I moved the hides to a five gallon bucket because I could not get them covered in the larger container.  In this bucket, I have three hides, several dew claw pieces, 2.5 gallons of vinegar, and one gallon of water.

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[HoBow]

Now we finally are at the tanning stage.  Pull the hides out of the pickling solution.  You can reuse this as long as the PH is does not come back above 3.  If it does, add a stronger acid to pull it back down.  Rinse the hides again with a hose.

Now, mix the alum tanning solution- 1 lb alum, 8 oz salt, 4 oz of sodium  bicarbonate (baking soda) for every gallon of water.  Mix it with warm water, but not hot as it will cook the hide into glue.  I let the hide set for 3-4 days. You can not overtan it, so let set longer if possible.  I let set 1 week.  You want to check back every day and stir the hide and make sure there are no problems, like hair slippage if you are doing a hair on tan.  Alum is an astringent, so slippage should not be an issue with this type of tan if you have made it this far.

Pictures:

1- Wash the hide of the picking solution

2-  This is the aluminum sulfate

3- Sodium Carbonate or baking soda

4- The three chemicals that will turn this green hide into leather

5- The hides in the solution

6- Make sure you weigh the hides down.  Anything not submersed will not be tanned.  Turn every day and stir the solution to make sure everything gets tanned.  The easy part is now over with.  The fun is about to begin.



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[nugget]

Thanks this has been very informative.

[Pat B]

Yes, this is very cool.  I'm looking forward to turning that hide into a quiver. 

[kerbinator]

I just killed a couple of coons will the same principle work for them. Cool Tan along. Marlin

[HoBow]

Kerbinator- This process will work on any hide.  Coon's can be greasy, so I would make sure to degrease them with dawn soap or something before or after you salt them.  I will be finishing up this tan-a-long sometime tomorrow.  The hides are now leather, I just need to post the last part.

[youngbowyer33]

so it would work for squirrel too?