hi everybody it is a beautiful spring day and i am getting ready to be doing some hide
tanning this week and i thought it was a great opportunity to show you a technique that a lot
of people don't know about as an alternative way to prepare hides for scraping in the brain
tanning process so most folks know that there are kind of two ways to prepare hides you can either
soak them in water and let bacteria do the work of starting to break down the glues that laminate
the grain surface to the dermis the part of the hide that we're after for grain tan buckskin
or you can buck them which is soaking them in an alkaline solution where it's actually the
alkalinity the chemical nature of being really really basic that's going to start to break
down some of those glues and make it possible to scrape either of those involve of course a lot of
water so you have to have a container you have to have the water and particularly the water soaking
technique can get a little stinky for sure because you're getting bacteria to do the work there is an
alternative to water soaking which also lets the bacteria do the work but it's not going to allow
it to get to quite such a big vat of funk that water soaking does and it's a simple technique
that's just called sweating basically what you need is a watery environment for the bacteria
to grow in to start to eat up the parts that you want them to help you break down in your hide
if you are using a fresh hide not one that's been flushed and salted and stored away or one that's
been dried but one that's still fresh either right off the deer or frozen while it still has all of
the moisture in the skin itself you can actually let the moisture that's already part of the
hide do the process for you and let that be the medium in which your hide is soaking rather than
a vat of funky water so what i do is i just take a hide like this and this is one that was in the
freezer the sweating process just looks like sealing that hide completely i have two layers
of plastic bags here to make sure that all of that moisture stays in the hide and it's just
rolled up flush on because this was in the freezer right so i didn't need to flush it
and then salt it and just sealing those bags up so i am tying it twice double bagged and tied twice
to seal all that moisture in there well all it needs is the moisture that's already in the hive
you can do it in a black garbage bag but i really prefer using a light colored garbage bag like this
because if you use a dark colored or particularly a black garbage bag and it gets in the sun
it can get so hot that it can actually damage the hide with the heat so it can actually get burnt in
there so the white means that it's not going to be subject to overheating as much and then it's
a good idea to keep this in the shade but have it be warm weather it's going to take forever
to do this if it's cold weather so we're relying on reasonably warm but not hot day keeping the
hide in the shade and having it be in a light colored container and then of course i don't
want to check it too much because i don't want to let it dry out but you know if it's a pretty darn
nice temperature somewhere in the 60s or 70s warm and comfortable to be out in your t-shirts and
shorts or your jeans and sweatshirt that's a good temperature for it and probably about three or
four days and you're gonna know that it's ready when the hair is pulling out easily with just a
little bit of pressure from the fingers hard to tell that from inside the bag but you can try it
or opening the bag quickly pulling those hairs and then tying it down nice and moisture tight
again of course you're going to want to take all of the same precautions with this as you
would with hide anywhere else making sure that it's somewhere that animals aren't going to be
able to get to it you don't want a neighborhood dog running off with it or a raccoon or a bear
they love the smell of soaking hides i've lost many hide to a neighborhood bear so make sure
that you put it somewhere safe that you keep it out of the warmth and that's all there is to it
sweating a hide super quick and easy and i'm gonna tell you it is a lot more pleasant
because it's not heavy and dripping with funky water you don't have this big vat of water
it's a much lesser bacteria content because there's just less medium for them to be growing
in and then while you're scraping it it's nowhere near as wet so you're not getting that funky water
squirting up into your face and all over you as you're scraping so when you have the ability i
really recommend the sweating hides instead of soaking or bucking them awesome technique thanks
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you