so before I dive into hide tanning I want to just demonstrate a very important piece of the puzzle
which is of course the skinning of the animal you can't tan the hide until it's off of the animal
and unfortunately so many people ruined hides with poor skinning and here is an example I've
scraped a little bit of it but a beautiful hide right totally intact from the hair side and a
good-sized hide a nice thickness and would have been a beautiful hide to tan but while it only
looked like it had one big hole here from the hair side inside you can see there are a bunch
of smaller holes and the whole thing is just covered in score marks score marks are what we
call it when you slice partway through the hide so I'm gonna go ahead and bring this up closer so
you get a good look at the carnage that is this one's lovely hide so check it out up here the
neck is just covered in slices that go part way through so some folks might look at this and say
oh no problem a lot of these don't go all the way through but the problem is when you go to scrape
it usually these score marks are going to open into holes and this height is gonna end up like
Swiss cheese so a total waste of a once beautiful hide I attribute a lot of wonderful hides that
get cut to shreds to skinning knives so the truth is you don't really need a big long bladed curved
skinning knife to skin an animal in fact those usually end up doing a much worse job so all
you really need is a nice small hold that where you can see it against there's a nice small very
sharp knife the thing to do is do an initial cut just behind the ears around the neck and down to
the chin and then right down the midline of the animal and this is important because if you go
off of the midline you're going to have a wonky shaped hide which is much less useful and then
out the inside of each limb to the hooves or paw depending on the animal and then around the foot
and then sometimes you need to do a little bit of knife work to free it up around the sternum
because the skin kind of sticks there and around the start of the neck but as soon as you have that
peeled away to where you can get hold of it then set your knife down you don't need it anymore the
best way to skin is one if your animal is hanging then using your bodyweight to pull it down off of
the animal or you can get in there with your fist hold the hide and push in with your fist
or with your knuckles or just with your thumb and you peel the hide off this is key hunters
please do a good job skinning the hide the truth is that a better skinned animal doesn't just yield
a better hide but it yields a lot more meat the issue with these big curved skinning knives as
they get in there and they're taking really broad slices and you can't necessarily see
where they're getting with those big long curved blades and it's really difficult visually to see
where the membrane on top of the muzzle stops and the skin starts because they're the same color so
and the texture isn't that different so unless you really know what you're doing and a lot of people
think what they're do they know what they're doing because they've skinned so many animals
but if you haven't tanned the hides than often you don't know if you're actually damaging it
so yeah it's so easy to slice into the hide or the meat and then you have this sliced up meat that's
clinging to your hide and just gets gross and has to be fleshed off waste of meat and waste of hide
so I like to start up by the neck so that I can get down behind the twitch muscle so deer have
this very fine thin layer of muscle all along from their neck down to their back to about the rumps
and we call it the twitch muscle because it's what to make the skin kind of shiver you know when like
a biting fly gets on an animal and their skin kind of does that shiver that's because of this
twitch muscle so it's very fine and it's really easy to peel the skin off and have that twitch
muscle stay on the skin and what you want is to leave it on the carcass so if you very carefully
go right around the shoulder blades and get that muscle unattached to the skin and left on the
carcass then you can peel the whole hide off with your bodyweight and then it doesn't require any
fleshing at all you get it totally clean hide and a really clean animal with that twitch muscle on
intact and then that will dry and it will form a covering over your animal so that you can hang it
and flies and Yellowjackets can't get in there it dries on and forms like an impenetrable skin that
protects your meat so better for everything so in order to scrape the hide we need to have something
that's going to break down the glues between the grain that shiny outside layer of the hide and the
dermis which is the middle of the hide which is what we're really after for our finished product
so the grain is held on there pretty tight and unless we do something to get it a little bit
looser it's going to be near impossible to scrape off using the wet scrape method so you can either
soak your hide in water in which case you're letting the bacteria do some of that work for you
or you can soak in an alkaline solution so alkyl ends are alkaline solutions are solutions with
a high pH so it's the opposite of acid and that looks like using either wood ash or hydrated lime
or potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide which is lye so all of those things have the action of
breaking down those glues a little bit and then the alkaline solutions also cause the hide to
plump a bit which can make it easier to see the grain so my preference if I have the proper timing
is to soak in a water bath and let the bacteria do the work for me the issue with that though is if
you if you have to store the hide longer than it ought to be the rock can go too far and again it
can get very stinky and it can also potentially break down your hide through the rot process so
if I'm going to be teaching and I have to have the right hides ready and they might be scraped for a
while or you know I need to get them prepped a little bit early and have them hold and not go
too far then I'm using the bucking method which is what we call soaking something an alkaline
solution so the water-soaked IDEs are looking good super floppy and pliable and I'm not able to get
the hair out super easily but it is slipping so the hair slipping out of the follicle when one
pulls on it like this that is the indicator that we use to tell when the hide is ready to scrape so
these hides were dried for a long time as opposed to what salted where they retain their moisture
and when they dry then the hair gets stuck on there a little bit more because the follicle
shrinks around it so these aren't going to slip as well as a hide that was never dried out so I'm
going to line up the hide so that the spine of the animal is running right down the middle of my beam
and my beam here is a piece of PVC pipe on top of half of a log so you can also just use a log the
only issue is if you leave it out in the weather all the time then it's going to get cracks with
the freeze/thaw freeze-thaw cycle or just from soaking up with water and then drying so PVC is a
nice modern solution to have a smooth surface beam but I also really like scraping on just wood so
again I'm going to line my hide up so it's neck up at the top of the beam and the tail as you can see
here maybe you can't see here because you can't see all of me all right well the tail is facing
down and then I'm gonna be scraping straight down the top of my beam you want to really avoid
working off to the side like this because it's easy to accidentally cut your hide so I'm using
a scraper that's made from a planer blade from a planing mill and it's very dull so I've dulled the
heck out of this because I'm pushing the grain off of the hide I'm not cutting or slicing the
grain off if it was sharp enough to slice it would just cut right through the hide and then I'd be
turning my height into ribbons so I want it dull enough that I can press really good right across
it without any risk of cutting my fingers and then it's not going to risk cutting the height
so another very important technique is scraping very thoroughly the first time
because if you haven't then you're going to be missing little bits of grain and
it's so much more time and energy to go over hide three times because you
weren't careful and methodical the first time so the way make sure I'm doing that
is I'm using short choppy strokes so two or three inches per stroke and then I'm working
back and forth as I go so that every stroke is overlapping the stroke to the side of it on the
sides and then also top to bottom so that means I'm actually going ever over every bit of hide
several times making sure that I've thoroughly removed all of the grain so if you can see right
here are some areas where I missed the green so some of this is full grain with the shiny part
intact and some of it is what we call subsurface screen which is some layers of the grain even
though it's not the full thickness so that was from doing poor strokes so let's clean that up
now it's time to scrape the backside which is the membrane side so the membrane is a thin layer
that's between the muscles and the skin itself now this is a really different process than the grain
even though it looks the same because the membrane isn't a real distinct layer like the grain is and
if you leave a little bit it's not a big deal so you don't have to be nearly as thorough with it
and it doesn't take as much pressure to remove it and also it's a lot easier to tell visually
when you've got it all off than the grain so in that way it's a lot easier it's kind of like the
reward for having finished the scraping membrane is like piece of cake after you finished greening
the whole thing so if you can tell there's a real distinct difference visually and where I've
already scraped and where it happened the membrane it's a lot more loose and kind of grippy than the
grain side so usually a lot of color tends to stick to it and it'll just pick up kind of dirt
and debris and that's part of why it's so easy to tell visually when you've gotten it all okay so
this side is membrane and ready to go so now it's a really good dryness to go into the dressing so
the membrane in process kind of squeegees out the hide and gets it drier so it's pretty good
I'm actually going to let it dry out a little bit more so that it's really around the consistency
of a wrung out sponge so that it's going to absorb the dressing really well so raining
complete membrane on the back side the flesh side complete and now getting the dressing prepared