HOME LEATHER TANNING: Tools You Need Explained

as I am steaming out home from school cult calm welcome to my homestead I have been experimenting with tanning leather and tanning leather for almost 30 years so when I make these videos I usually know more or less what I'm talking about and you should listen to me when I tell you which tools you need do you make mark tanned leather now if you want to know the entire process for bar tanning the best resource I know right now as of the making of this video is my series on making straps from scratch where I go through the whole process with the deer hide and you can get a pretty good idea of what you need to do from that so what we call bark tan leather also known as a vegetable tanned leather and in that case vegetable is referring to plants in general not vegetables that we like to think of now that's old school terminology vegetable tanning is using tannic acid from plant sources that could be roots leaves fruits or barks to tan lettuce you can make a lot of different kinds of leather this for instance is a heavy hard dense leather soft leathers like this you can make smooth leathers or you can make leathers that are kind of in between they have a little bit of body but might be a little bit more pliable so I'm gonna outline the process for you real quick so there's we go through these different tools alright you need to shut up at the throw acorns at yeah she doesn't care go have your issues somewhere else before we get started I'm gonna run through this process is just an outline so that you understand when I talk about these different tools and what they're used for you you know what process I'm talking about now there are endless variations to this but I'm just gonna outline like a real basic typical type of a process we get to hide off the animal we need to get off the flesh and fat and other extra tissue that isn't leather we'll do that again and go over the flush side numerous times but you go for a first flushing that's gonna get the bulk of it off if the hairs gonna be removed it's usually soaked in lime or wood ashes which are alkali caustic alkali they loosen the hair and allow us to push it out so then we actually push the hair out and then we need to rinse out all that alkali from the skin the alkali will make the hide all plumped up and rubbery and thick but if not involves repeated rinsing and scraping so we're gonna rinse scraper and scrape rinse scrape until it's all floppy and loose like it was before it went in the line when it's time to tan the hide we're going to take our tanning mitts eriell chop it grind it whatever we need to do to get out the tannin and then either soak it or cook it in water to make a solution and tan the height in that we can also layer the skin with layers of ground tanning material and skin and then cover that with water or bark caning solution but that also doesn't require any real specialized tools once the skin is penetrated all the way through with the tan or tanned as much as we want it to be then we take it out scrape over the flesh side clean it up scrub it wash it wash out the extra town and then it's time to finish finishing the lather can be relatively simple or fairly complicated depending on what you're trying to do what kind of lather you're making what kind of skin you have in the first place this for instance is just oiled and then smoothed out and dried flat it's pretty no hard is good for sheets and stuff like that sometimes you want the skin to be even denser and harder than that and so you can actually compress it or you might want the skin to be really floppy in which case you're gonna oil it differently you're gonna use different oils and you're gonna work it differently or you might want it in between like this which is kind of got quite a bit of body and it's not really stretchy or that pliable but it's much more pliable than that and of course once your nice leather is all finished you're gonna want to use it but that's an entirely different trade different set of tools and all that so let's get started if you're going to skin animals yourself all you really need is a sharp knife helps to have a rope - watch my video on skinning animals cleanly - you know how to get them off without cutting them up you also may need to store the skins I have a video on salting skins and just talking about what you know the options drawing freezing and salting containing the most indispensable frequently used tools are the duo of the tanning beam and the Tanners knife also known as a flushing knife usually these come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes you can get away with a lot of different things if you're just kind of a casual home tanner there's also a lot of new stuff on the market and I'll show you one in a second you know I would say that my recommendation is around 20 inches long with a 10 to 12 inch blade maybe up to 22 inches or something like that you can make them at home watch my video flushing knives 101 for the full lowdown on that here's some examples this is made from an old planer blade with some rubber tubing for handle this is an old-school european-style knife that's really cool this is one that I forged with antler handles actually I like along this tool is a weeb 12-inch flusher I just got this in the mail and I haven't used it yet but just looking at it it looks great for an under $30.00 knife who knows if it'll hold an edge or not but even if it doesn't I could use this as long as it doesn't break I could use this for tanning everything I do for the rest of my life and get away with it would it be ideal not necessarily but it would be quite good actually and so I'm gonna go out on a limb and recommend this for an affordable option and it's stainless looks real nice but a little tentatively because I haven't actually used it yet most beams are wood I prefer to use wood I would try to stick with something eight inches in diameter or larger because of the radius of the curve you can change that though if you have to use a small log you could flatten off the radius with an axe and a draw knife to get something that's a more equivalent to in curved to a larger log basically I try to stick with 8 inches and up maybe the most important thing is you want to relatively clean smooth surface this one's kind of cracked and messed up because it's been out in the weather for years it's definitely overdue for being replaced but you want everything from about 3 inches down to at least 20 inches down like a 20 inch space maybe 24 inches it's nice and clean that means no huge cracks no big knots no giant gouges and tears and stuff like that if you have a round log as long as the grain is straight and if I was selecting a tree I would select a straighter entry just for this purpose I would split it in half down the middle and then maybe hollow out the underside to watch my video on splitting billets for kind of tips and tricks on that the reason is that's going to reduce the incidence of cracking but also the severity of cracking the thicker a piece of wood is and especially a round log with the center that's still in like the center of the bullseye and the Rings the more likely it is to crack and the larger the cracks will be so if we can take that log split it in half hollow out the underside a little bit and make it more like a slab that's more of an even thickness that will reduce both the severity and incidence of cracking a great place to get almost a ready-made beam is to go to a lumber mill or talk to someone who does custom milling because one of the first things I often do is slab off these slabs off the side of round logs and then they start milling out the lumber those guys really have any use for these things I just cut them up for firewood usually so they'll probably give you a couple of them for free go to a local lumber mill look in the phone book for custom milling or go to your local chainsaw shop and ask those guys he does that as far as what kind of wood to use you can get away with a lot don't worry about it too much my preference is maple here big leaf maple on the west coast I'm sure other maples are good a lot of people use Cottonwood well I was good but you just kind of use what you have this is I think this one's fir or unless it's redwood SAP wood but either way it works fine don't worry about that too much lengthwise we're looking at five and a half to six and a half feet I would go with six to six and a half feet this is six or four inches and I really like this one another option is plastic this is actually abs which is pretty thin walled PVC would be even better I would go with at least eight inches if you can afford it ten inches would be better four legs this just has two inch holes drilled in it and sticks just stuck in there that works fine you can do the same thing with a wooden beam this wooden beam has two by threes that are lagged in on edge with just enough space to slip in a piece of plywood first and and it's kind of floppy but honestly every beam I've ever setup has been this kind of floppy messy thing and you just find a way to make it work you know put rocks on the end stick it under a stump put stakes around the legs or whatever and it always seems to work out there's a couple tools you might need for maintaining your beam you need to put the beam in good condition and smooth it off in the first place and then if it gets damaged you need to fix it those are the draw knife and spokeshave if I was gonna pick just one of these I would pick the draw knife it's a little bit more versatile it'll do all the heavy work that you need to do and then you can still use it to smooth the surface pretty much and if you need it smoother than that you can use scraping sandpaper etc this is just a great tool to have around anyway they're really not that expensive on eBay I think you could probably still get a high quality used one for twenty twenty-five bucks because there's just so many of them out there the spoke shape is more of a refining tool and something you'd use to kind of clean the beam up here and there if you're gonna buy a spokeshave get one with some kind of an adjustment for the depth of cut like this is a stanley number 53 which has have a unique mechanism with this little screw that moves the jaw and a lot of them will have just two screws up here that you turn it just the blade in and out what I would not recommend is getting the type where this was just a screw right here that you loosen and kind of have to adjust the blade manually and then try it and keep doing that and screwing around it's just there's no good excuse for buying one of those unless it's like super cheap rubber apron and elbow gloves and rubber boots I think out of these the most essential to me would be the elbow gloves I don't like using any kind of short gloves because you're gonna stick your hand into some kind of solution they're gonna fill with water it happens every time these are the Atlas nitrile elbow gloves they're about 12 or 13 bucks on Amazon I think and I'll put a link in the description and they run a little small if you think you have medium hands get the large I've medium hands on these medium they're too small shopping for aprons keep in mind there's a big difference in quality this apron I got at a yard sale 20 years ago it's heavy-duty rubberized cloth and it's still going strong so look at the reviews and trying to get one that's uh you know has a cloth backing or rubberized cloth water is both a tool and a material you're going to use it all the time and use a lot of it it's nice to have a hose handy all the time for rinsing because you're gonna constantly be rinsing your tools to hide your hands etc so get a hose hooked up if you can and also put a shutoff valve on it so you don't have to keep walking back to the spigot to turn it on shutoff of some kind gives you a variability of flow so I actually like these simple shutoff valves because I can open it wide open to fill containers really fast or I can dial it down to any point I want and get a decent amount of pressure and I have low pressure and that's enough to watch a lot of stuff clean you know kind of like spraying it off that gun type squeeze sprayers are nice for washing stuff off but they don't have the same kind of high flow like this when you want to build something up if you want a great hose for really cheap craftsman puts these rubber hoses on sale every year watch my review on those and they're like 20 to 25 bucks for 50 foot hose and I don't think you're gonna find a better deal for durability they never gets stiff and they're super tough so you can walk all over them and now they're great brushes are nearly indispensable they're the best way to clean your tools your apron your boots the beam all that kind of stuff you want a stiff brush for that something like this or this one is a good multipurpose brush it's pretty stiff but there's one other thing you'll use a brush for and that's removing something called bloom from the grain side to hide with certain tanning materials and especially with pit tanning or layering it's called where you layer the skin with the shredded bark you get this stuff called bloom and it's just a whitish deposit but it's actually kind of tough and hard to get off so the best way to remove that is with a brush but something more along the lines of a medium hair brush unfortunately mine is missing so I can't show you but as long as you're not damaging the grain and you're getting the stuff off then that's good you'll need containers of specific kinds for Bark tanning as far as materials go avoid anything that can rust or has rust on it because it will permanently stain the hide safe materials are plastic rubber glass stainless steel wood ceramic enameled I'll use galvanized containers if they're absolutely clean with no scratches are rust but only for liming and rinsing aluminum I'll use for rinsing and that's about it you need to match the size of the container to the high that your tanning to some extent you don't want it to be way too big or way too small so if your tanning things like first skins and you know small fur bearers you could probably get away with buckets like this let's say that I have a sheep high that I want to tan and I stuff it in here and a tanning liquor or the lime liquor or something it's gonna be all stuffed against itself and crushed in there it's gonna be touching the walls of the bucket a lot and the solution basically isn't gonna be able to get in there and work on the hide we take that height and put it into here and then it's gonna have room to move around for the liquor to get to every part of the skin we're still gonna have to stir it a little bit but it's better now if we took and let's say a kid Poole or some huge container and put it in there then suddenly we need a lot of liquor to fill that whole thing up just to get the thing to work so there's quite a bit of leeway there but you don't want it have stuff too crowded or in gigantic containers the shape of the container can be a factor too I really like these rectangular tubs because I can use them for a process called layering so layering you fold the skin up with layers of bark in between now traditionally you would lay the hide flat on a layer of bark adds some more bark do another hide more bark more hide more bark and you just make this sort of lasagna well that's fine if you have a big container and your Tanning 20 heights at a time that is the only accounting one height of the time and again you Pro say a deer hide in a kiddie pool then you have this weird situation with all the extra room around the outside and you're gonna have to fill it up quite a bit to get it to work so if we take that same height and I put a layer of bark in here and I lay part of the height in there put some bark on top of that fold it over and then add more bark and fold out and kind of fold it an accordion fold it around as long as there's bark between every layer of skin then I'm good I fill it up with liquor or water and let it sit for 1 to 3 months so for that reason I like these because every time you pull the hi what do you make a straight edge right so that straight edge is gonna go well in this tub and it's not gonna go so well in these round wine barrels behind me because every time you lay that folded skin in there you have a big wasted space where that straight edge meets a curved wall round containers are okay you can get away with in my hand and these guys quite a bit depends on how much your tanning what your tanning what method you're using etc round tubs are also nicer for stirring because you know they're round and they stuff moves around really easy so if you have round containers already or that's what you can get for free or cheap you could use them it's not that big of a deal or anything but if you're gonna go out and buy something I think that these rectangular tubs are kind of the most versatile you do want to have some buckets around because they're useful for other stuff for transferring liquors and who knows what they're just useful I use a lot of time so get some buckets these rectangular tubs and they're widely available they come in a lot of different sizes that you can be used for storing salted hides and for all the other different processes for things the size of goats deer sheep this size right here which i think is around 18 I'm thinking maybe 18 to 20 gallons is a good size when you get into things like moose and elk and Buffalo and cattle and horse then you want to look at something a little bit bigger maybe go up to like 30 to 40 gallons I've used these wine barrels a lot I really like having them around because they're so cool-looking and they're very romantic and all that practically speaking they're not the greatest you have to keep them filled with water or liquid or they'll dry out and start to leak that means I've reading mosquitoes all the time and then you have to dump them out all the time which is actually not that easy because they're really big and they're heavy and the barrel itself is heavy it's not just the water you know I'll probably replace these when they wear out but they're not the most practical things I wouldn't go out of your way to get them I certainly wouldn't pay more than about $30 for one they're very expensive new but once the wineries use them for a while the flavor gets leached out into the wine and then they don't use them anymore and they just get rid of them like mini Tanner's I use these rectangular tubs a lot probably the most but I also have a large collection of other you know stock tubs and miscellaneous containers that I use a lot of our tanning materials need to be chopped or ground up to make them into small pieces so we can easily extract the Tanner with water for bark and wood I will just put down a large tarp set down a trunk afire win or something and start chopping it with a hatchet into little pieces for most people including myself I wouldn't recommend using a hatchet really any heavier than this and it's not just a matter of how strong you are how big your arms are etc it's also about how used your body is to that repetitive stress or similar repetitive stress like using a hammer or something like that this is kind of more your average size of American hatchet and this is perfectly fine it's totally adequate to the task and certainly a better place to start for most people for a more industrial solution you could be looking at chipper shredders like garden shredders or the big industrial type with the big industrial ones you can throw anything in there but they're real expensive to rent and so unless you're shredding just a huge quantity of bark at once it's probably not worth it the small ones work I've used them but you really need to reduce the stuff to small enough pieces that it's not going to bog down the shredder because the average garden shredder just isn't that heavy-duty the other thing that could help is to do the bark when it's green instead of dry because it's much much softer if there's any rust and side of the mechanism you should run a bunch of other stuff through like a bunch of branches and leaves and stuff to try to kind of clean some of that out you definitely don't want any rust in your tanning liquor or in tanning materials a lot of smaller materials don't really need to be shredded if it's something that's pretty soft or you know at least not super hard you might be able to just throw it in a blender and grind it up a little bit certain things like acorn caps and oak galls I don't bother to bust up very much just throw them in hole or break them up a little bit it just depends on the material and there's so many different materials that you're gonna have to figure out what to do but what you usually don't want to do is put in giant chunks of stuff like this because you're not gonna get everything out or not gonna get as much out and it's gonna take a long time it is possible to leach the tannic acid out of the material with cold water but it's going to take a lot longer and you're not gonna get as much out so most the time it's preferable to cook it I use these large stock pots this one's a six gallon so I use it things from about 3 to 6 gallons good ones are expensive but they're a lifetime investment and I find for my lifestyle they're pretty much indispensable quality wise there's a lot of cheap ones out there the factors you really want to look at our wall thickness general like quality of design and construction which usually has to do with the handles whether they're gonna fall off or not and steel quality so you know if you're buying on Amazon read the reviews really carefully because sometimes the steel is really low quality if they're imports you know if the walls are thin that's totally fine if you're only cooking bark or it doesn't matter if you burn stuff but the thin bottom will burn really easily if you use it for anything else it won't wear out because it's stainless so unless you punch a hole in it even a super thin one should last a long time another thing you can do is just cut the top out of a beer keg a lot of home brewers do that I also scored a large stainless pool filter one time it's really heavy duty I was a big heavy lid on top and I was a hole in the bottom which I plumbed to have a valve so I can fill that thing with bark build a fire underneath it and when the liquor is done I drain it off the drain on the bottom but you can't find those with that kind of a lid usually they're split so the the bottom and the top are about the same size and that makes it fairly worthless for cooking but if you happen to see a stainless pull filter that's tall with a short lid snagit they're awesome one of the finishing tools is just a large smooth slab of something it could be plastic or stone or concrete or wood a lot of people will have access to maybe a large sheet of plywood that's smooth on one side this one here is just a big slab of plastic it's pretty smooth on one side about 3/4 of an inch thick there's two main tools we use on this a slicker and the slicking iron I'm gonna bring you in closer so you can see these things up close and I'll show you what they're used for this is a finished piece of leather but I'm just going to use it to demonstrate here you use the slab in these tools when you want a piece of leather to be flat and smooth when it first comes out of the tan you're gonna put the grain side down flush side up and use the slicking iron to basically stretch the skin from the inside toward the outside and start to smooth out the wrinkles and inconsistencies so usually when it comes out of the tan the edges will be real wavy and it'll be kind of shrunken up and maybe a little miss shapen and so you're just gonna use this to kind of start to flatten it out and also just get it kind of stretched out to the sides as much as possible because it'll be kind of shrunken now some of that is done on the beam when it first comes out but this is a really helpful tool the other thing this will do is take some of the liquid out sometimes so if there's a lot of liquid in the skin you'll be kind of squishing it out of the hiding off of the edges it doesn't have a very sharp edge but it has enough friction like there's enough of an edge that it kind of grips in there and it'll grip the height and stretch it outward like that I'd say if you're gonna make one of these make it about 4 inches this way without the handle and about 5 inches wide I think this is four and a half inches wide the edge is radiused very slightly or it can be flat along here but you just want the edges to drop off and definitely round these off real well again it's not sharp like I couldn't cut myself with it or anything like that but there is a little bit of an edge so it's grippy the ideal handle for this would be more teardrop shape so thicker than this up here and thinner down here so it kind of fits the hand like that use stainless if you can get it if you can't carbon steels okay cheap scrapers like this are widely available this one I would cut down to about five inches wide and it would be nice to have a different handle on it and then take a file and kind of round these corners off and bring this to an edge and then dull it to the right dullness and these things are probably like four or five bucks next we're going to take this and flip it over and that's where this tool is used these were traditionally made with slate or glass you can make a slate one pretty easy like if you live in a region where there's a lot of slate roofs you can get a piece of slate that way or if there's any slate quarries the stuff is pretty easy to work this should be rounded off to a radius and polished smooth and the edges need to be rounded real smooth and broke gradual so this tool is used to further smooth out these wrinkles and just kind of like work them down until there's as few wrinkles as possible it also finishes this side smooth so when it's wet you can just dent it easily like if I tap it like that it's gonna leave a dent for instance so I'm going to take this tool and as I get it all laid out I'm just gonna start doing nice smooth strokes like that to leave the surface perfectly smooth you can buy slickers made of glass because some leather workers still use them I would make the glass one about 3/8 of an inch thick and about this size which is about 5 by 4 I guess now the slicker is used with oil on the skin so we're gonna oil the skin first and then use the slicker the other thing we'll do is after using the slicking iron put fat all over this side and then flip this over and this is exactly how this skin was finished and then start work on the grain side but don't ever move the skin again and we're actually gonna use the slicker to paste the skin down and stick it with that fat we put on the back say like some deer fat or tallow or even lard can work but it's better to have a little bit thicker fat and we're just gonna smash that down it's gonna actually stick to the board if we dry it nice and slow it'll dry flat like sometimes the edges will curl up a little bit or something like that but that's not really a big deal so that's the other use of your board is drying skins flat and it's very useful for that your options otherwise are to use a frame and lace it into the frame or you can nail it up to a wall if you nail it to a wall or a piece of plywood use galvanized nails and preferably hot dipped galvanized nails because they won't rust don't use anything that's already rusty and preferably don't use anything that's going to rust because rust will stain the hide block wherever it touches it so for some leather that's going to be you just let it dry let the oils soak into the hide and maybe that's your sheath leather or something you would make boots or belts out of or something like that this piece was done that way but then it was read dampened slightly and worked a little bit and that's what we're gonna go talk about next alright let's look at some softening tools this is called a graining board it's used for softening the skin and creating a certain effect on the grain side it's just a piece of wood with a hand strap and it has grooves cut across here like this so the way this works is I'm going to fold the skin grain side to grain side it's damp not wet not dry and I'm going to set this on here and roll the skin like that what that does is it first of all it compresses the grain so if I fold it grain to grain it's gonna make the grain wrinkle right wherever it's folded and if I do that in different directions it makes this cool wrinkled effect which is called the process is called graining so if you want the grain to remain smooth and you don't do that the other thing that's happening is I'm just bending the hide really sharply and that break kind of breaks it and works it and softens it this is one that has the grooves across here like that so I'm going to glue on a piece of cork here but this is also a little different and that's gonna have a post handle right here and then it'll have a strap there and that's called an arm board I'll cut it in a picture of an antique one you can look at so this is just going to be a little bit more efficient for working a large hides or doing a lot of work now the reason for the cork face is because if you don't want the grain wrinkled then when you do that you have to fold the hide with the flush side to the flush side instead of the grain side to the grain side so you need something that's gonna provide a little bit of grip and grab onto the skin and help you roll it but it's not going to damage the grain now you don't necessarily need any of these tools for instance I'd ever made a cork board yet and I just do this by hand so I've soften this skin by just kind of you know however rolling it with my hand or something to you know Bend the hide in the same way the other way you can do it is just roll the whole hide up or part of the hide into a roll like that and then roll it like this to work it and usually going to want to do that in a lot of different directions you know front to back side to side and diagonal and that's how this was softened and that's how this was softened sometimes you might have a piece of leather that's heavy and dense and you want it to be more heavy and dense so you can take it in a damp State and pound the grain surface to compress it it'll get quite a bit thinner and a lot denser and harder that's what this mallet is for it's made out of iron wood so it's extremely heavy you want this face to be dead smooth and you want it to just round real slowly off at the corners okay this tool is called the steak it's just a post with a blade set on it you can just use a sharpened piece of wood like a sharpened post but it doesn't work nearly as well this one has a small stainless blade screwed in here this is something that you would use a lot more for first because you can't work the first side at all right and you need a way to bend and stretch and work the flesh side of a fur so you just throw it over the top of here and pull it over and what that does is it bends the fibers sharply and kind of breaks them open and softens the skin these can also be handy if you're trying to get a piece of bark tan leather really really soft because it does provide like a really strong Bend and it stretches the hide out so the rolling on the table doesn't stretch the skin as much so this can really help you get those skins extra extra soft so you can probably see here how much that stretches the skin and again this is something that's done while the height is damp so you're gonna damp the hide back let's talk about actually how to do that in an actual tanning video and as it dries you work the skin like that to break it and soften it if I were gonna make a blade for multi-purpose use for a home tanner would probably be about six inches wide you just kind of want the blade supported back here and screw it on with stainless screws and then you can just leave it in the rain or not have to worry about it rusting or anything it doesn't have to hold an edge it's not sharp at all you can make it a little bit sharp for certain uses but in general it's gonna be you know have a little friction to it but it's not going to be sharp like this there's no way you could cut yourself with this I hope this video answered your most critical questions about the subject of course there are some satellite skills that you might need to make tools and maintain them such as sharpening and tools for sharpening but we can't cover those today if this video is successful I might do another one on tools for brain tanning because they're a little bit different so let me know if that's an interest to you I'll probably also do one on tanning materials for bar caning because that's also an important topic and I get lots and lots of questions on that I have two important tanning play that I'm in a link in just a few seconds here at the end of the video one is the strops from scratch series which follows the tanning of a deer hide from start to finish and the other one is just a general tanning playlist where I put all of my tanning videos it's a little random I kind of jump around topics a bit but there's a lot of good critical information and of course I'll be adding to that in the future

Channel: SkillCult

Views: 61,844

Rating: 4.9617043 out of 5

Keywords: SkillCult, Steven Edholm, Prepping, Survival, Self Reliance, Homesteading, tanning hides, vegetable tanning, tanning leather, home tanning hides, tanning skins, how to tan leather, tanning with oak bark, fleshing, fleshing a deer hide, oak tanning, tannic acid, woodcraft, bushcraft, fleshing beam, fleshing skins, natural leather tanning, deer skin tanning, tanning with bark, bark tanning, how to, tanning tools, leatherworking, finishing leather, trapping, tanning furs

Id: M-vScJGq3bA

Length: 28min 53sec (1733 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 18 2018