tanning furs is generally more complicated and more difficult than tanning buckskin because
you've got the grain layer on the hide which is resistant to the moisture of your dressing passing
through and then also because you've got the fur that's going to be holding moisture insulating
the hide and making it dry a lot slower which means you have to spend a lot more time working
the hide also rabbit hides are one of the trickier to do because they're quite thin and
not a very strong hide so you have to work harder in order to soften them while being gentle enough
that you're not going to risk tearing the hide so i am going to demonstrate tanning of rabbit
hides today and i'm going to be demonstrating a technique that i have yet to show to my students
in my courses or on my youtube channel and that is a technique called freeze tanning freeze tanning
is actually just a way of going about brain tanning or smoke tanning which are technically the
same thing you can brain tan using other dressings not just brains and the real part that actually
solidifies the tan is smoke tanning so it has a lot of different names but freeze tanning is a way
to make the process of brain slash smoke tanning a little bit easier so it's a wonderful technique
to know if you live in a climate that gives you temperatures below about 15 degrees fahrenheit
when you're getting into that cold that is so cold that it's a dry cold so things freeze and then the
moisture actually evaporates out of the hides a process called sublimation going from solid
straight into gaseous form without ever getting wet in between if you don't live in a climate
that affords you nice low temperatures for freeze tanning you can do the same process or similar
using a really powerful freezer which as you can see looking around me is what i'm going to be
doing today because it rarely gets that cold here we get some windows in the winter where we might
get into the low teens or single digits but it's certainly not happening in july so i'm going to be
demonstrating freeze tanning using a freezer and the first thing that i do is i take my dried skins
and i go ahead and dunk them in water and completely saturate them some folks take dried
hides and they only work the dressing in from the flesh side but it's really really hard to get it
all the way through when you've got a hide in a state that is rawhide in the middle so i think
it's much much better to soak them so that they are 100 completely saturated and then leave them
out where the fur side can actually dry and then dress them first step into the bucket and this is
just water and it is warm but not hot water that's really key so warm water is gonna relax the fibers
soak them up faster and allow them to kind of open up and absorb better hot water could potentially
cook them and destroy the hides so warm water plenty of it and then i'm just gonna be dunking
the hides and leaving them in here and then i'll be checking them every hour or so and moving them
around and waiting until they're really nice and wet and sloppy and flexible like a wet noodle
that's what i'm looking for to know that all of those fibers even in the very middle of the hide
are no longer hide they are no longer glued to one another they are completely wet and loose
and stretching past one another i generally case skin the rabbit so take the skin off in a tube
like this and then i typically open that up to tack them out so that they dry quicker but i do
have one here that was dried in the tube on on a hide stretching frame so you can see two examples
okay so it has been a little bit over an hour
and as you can see the hides are no longer papery they are totally loose and floppy and flexible
what they are not is completely stretchy yet so the hide is basically soaked up but the fibers
are still stuck together by those glutes so i need to do something to break those fibers apart and
allow them to move independently what i would do in order to do that is work the whole surface of
the hide gently because rabbit hides are not very strong and when those fibers are
still stuck together they're even less strong but pulling until i go from the kind of see-through
translucent color to a slightly more opaque color so i've been working this little spot
back and forth in different directions for a moment and i want to show you the difference
so see how right here it's a little bit more uniformly white and opaque
versus right here it's more translucent and i can see right through to that
black color of the skin so this is what i want the whole thing to be
another thing i could do would be to have a cable set up and work it back and forth over the cable
so i'm going to squeeze these out so that they're less sloppy wet
in the fur i'm going to leave these in the sun to have that fur dry out a little bit but
skin side it down so that they won't dry at all the skin pretty lovely huh
see that there these yellow parts are the parts where the fibers are
still glued together and they're more translucent and now as i pull
and stretch
you can see that that yellow bits disappear and now it's all white and more uniform so again
what i'm looking for to know that this is nice and opened up and ready to accept the dressing is that
it feels not just loose and sloppy and flexible but stretchy that it gives when i pull on it hides
are going to absorb the dressing best if they are slightly damp but not sloppy wet just like
a sponge absorbs more on a wet counter if it's a wrung out sponge versus a totally dry sponge it
just pushes the moisture around and a sloppy wet sponge it's absorptive but it doesn't have room
to absorb any more than it's already full of hides are the same way alright so here is my dressing my
mixture of egg yolks warm water olive oil and dr bronner's lavender is my preference castile soap
i'm going to pour my dressing and do my best to really work it into
the edges once i had done that manually that is when working in the
dressing and doing the freeze thaw cycles really makes a difference
nicely frozed up rabbits several freeze thaw cycles in see how the fibers are all popped
apart and white here from the freezing that's what we're after so i have had these hides take up the
dressing a lot better a lot faster than hides that i'm not doing the freeze thaw and this one
is already nicely thawed because it wasn't super wet i'd been working it for a while so definitely
been an excellent technique although it didn't save me the work of manually opening the hides
on the cable that i still did and it was probably slightly easier but i did my test piece
and the pieces that had been in the freezer and really didn't notice enough of a difference
to make it seem like that's something that i would want to do so just the soaking
and then the opening up and then the dressing and that's where the freeze thaw cycle really comes in
so i'm alternating direction as i go around the hide pulling first along the spine and then
across the spine and then it angles to the spine being sure that i constantly am moving that hide
so that all of those fibers are pulling away from one another rather than getting glued in one spot
all right here are four different five different rabbits in various stages of the brain tanning
slash smoke tanning process so there is this one which is a fully finished and softened
and you can see it is luscious and bouncy stretchy this one which is the opposite
still frozen solid right out of the freezer after one round of the dressing being worked in and then
frozen into it this one here you can see still has some moisture in it and some drier areas by those
different colors you can see this one is very nicely dressed really soft and stretchy and bouncy
but it still has a lot of drying to do i want to show you the difference between a high that is
mostly dry and one that is totally finished obviously one of the indicators is i can feel the
moisture in this one and this one feels totally dry and part of that is feeling the temperature
difference i can feel the cool with my fingers whereas this one is totally warm and it's really
about ambient temperature it's a warm day today so this one feels warm to the touch while this one
feels cool to the touch so the other important indicator is how it stretches so this one that
still has some moisture when i pull it it bounces back very slightly but it mostly
stays in that stretched out position versus this one when i pull it see how it bounces right back
bounces back that is a sign that there's no more moisture in here and it's returning to
its natural shape as soon as i let go of it so several different stages and i will be taking
them all through so that they all luscious and dry and soft and stretchy and ready to go like
this one we had a good dousing rain last night so it is moist everywhere and it is still nice
and cloudy so everything is humid and fire danger is much lower than it's been all summer and i am
psyched about the smoking setup i've got using the awning of my spring bar tent and my winter well
stove so i'm able to hang out in the shade under the fly of the awning watching my furs smoke
and the winter well stove is absolutely perfect because not only is it small and mobile but it
has this water jacket that goes around the chimney and what you want for smoking hides is for a smoke
that is cool enough not to damage the hides and that keeps the hides well away from the smoldering
coals so the chimney makes distance between it and the coals and then the water jacket on the stove
absorbs a lot of the heat as it goes up the chimney so i have nice cool smoke and my hides are
turning out like a dream and i don't have to worry about any sparks or flames because it's a whole
sealed system so working awesome for smoking my furs and these are going to turn out beautifully
luscious soft fur awaits you hooray