How I Process Deer Legs for Sinew, Skins, Bones, Hooves and Glue Stock

hi I'm Stephen Idol from the soon-to-be popular YouTube channel skill cult perhaps you've heard of me well perhaps not people often ask me Stephen how do you process your deer legs well today I'm going to show you how I process deer legs okay here we go I'm going to show you how I process deer legs now I have done so many of these just big piles of them I used to skin for hunters at these like check stations where the hunters had to bring their deer through a check station I just skin the animals and exchange for the hide but you know I'd end up with these piles of legs no one you know no one wants the legs so yeah you know you come home and it's like summertime because our gear hiding seasons in August and it's hot and you got this pile legs and no way to freeze them refrigerate I mean you just gotta process them so I got pretty fast at just you know ripping these things apart and getting the parts that I wanted first I'm going to show you what to do if you don't want to keep this skin like if you want to keep the skin with the hooves on that's a different story if you just want to use it for glue stock this is how I do it sharp knife is essential also a thin knife is better like a narrow knife rather this way because you can get it under the skin and that's kind of true for making any skinning opening cuts where you're cutting from underneath ok so just zip this open cut the skin off this makes very good glue you can kind of stitch it on two handles and stuff and just let it dry with the fur on it that's kind of cool just lay it out to dry I don't flush it at all you know there's some tendons and stuff here but I just dry that stuff on if I want to use it for something you now what most people will show you is to cut underneath here and cut this out and cut out this all this stuff that's how I was taught to do it and what I do is I open this sheath right here and I slice the sheath open so what we have is actually a tendon within a sheath I also feel down here where there's like a knot where the what this is is a fork where the tendon splits and it goes to this toe in this dough in visto and I've never been able to really shred the sinew effectively past that point so it's just a waste of time to spend my time trying to like skin the sinew out any deeper than just right before that knot like right where it divides cut it out done now there's more sinew on the back here you could definitely use that as sinew I typically will end up using this part as glue stock now all of this this is the sheath that's what I call it this makes great glue however my experience that does not make great sinew if you want the hooves you can pull the hose off with hot water and we'll get to that in a minute if you want to make more glue you can actually cook this whole section for glue when people say hoof glue you can't make glue from hoofs you trust me take take a pile of these and boil them as long as you want it will not turn into glue there's no such thing as hoof glue what they mean is the foot it's all this stuff and these lower legs like if the sinew wasn't wanted and none of this was wanted they would just smash this up cook it skim the oil off the top for neat's-foot oil and then all of this connective tissue down in here makes great glue but since there's a lot of fat involved I would really suggest that you just save this extra scraps and if you don't need sinew just cook all the sinew into glue just get make sure you get rid of this like meat you don't want meat on there so I'm just going to process a couple more of these quick real quick knife work just to get this freed up I'm just glad the yellowjackets out and family they have my number over at the house they're just swarming because once I got this deer the other day there were you know blood and stuff laying around they're like oh this is a restaurant here send you all this stuff's good for glue stock ok now I'm gonna show you one more thing so right here in the front leg only there are two bones called needle bones right here and you cut those out and there's a little joint right up here you can feel it move okay so that's the needle bone and you really have to kind of just scrape it with a knife to get it clean you can cut off what you can now and then dry it and scrape it clean later please stock get the tendons off the back if you're not using these as sin you just get under there and cut all this connective tissue any sheets or you know whatever all of its good for glue just like I said just scrape the meat off that's the important thing you're not making soup stock it's glued well you get the idea and next we're going to I'm going to go get some hot water and we're going to remove the hooves okay now it's time to remove the hood I got leaves all over my legs here this water is hot it is not boiling any more but it was close to boiling a minute ago and that's good enough now you can also do this in a campfire so if you can you know dip the leg in water first but you don't have to and then just bury it under the hot ashes they'll get it so close that it's going to like scorch your hooves so this is going to cook and loosen all this connective tissue that's inside of the hoof and allow us to just yank the hoof off okay so once they soften up good now what you don't want to do is leave them soaking and like boiling hot water for a really long time that's going to cook the connective tissue so much that the hooves will just the whole foot will fall apart you just want the hoof to be loosened up a little bit okay so you can also do this by hand a lot of the time so you really don't need anything just fire see that one's coming off real easy like they don't always come off that easy it's just this might be an easy deer little little guys are kind of hard to grab these things are pretty cool they make really neat little rattles I'll show you a rattle I made with these and they make cool decorations on bags and stuff like that especially since they kind of rattle around so usually I mean if I'm doing a lot of these I just grab a pair of pliers because it's a lot easier but there you go now while these are nice and green you can trim them up we'll talk more about these some other time I think but just for now if you if you do this go ahead and trim them while they're green you can also reso chem after they're dried but you can't really trim them when they're driving they just get way too hard and then you can either leave this bottom part in it's called the Frog it's like a softer part or you can slice it out like if you're making rattles it changes the sound of the rattle so you can either cut that out or leave it and also if you're going to poke holes like in a more primitive situation if you didn't have a drill say you're using like it on all my bow and all or something you could poke a hole in this and then put a stick in it like a little tiny stick and leave that stick in there to dry so then you'll have a nice round hole when it's dry you pull the stick out okay I just want to show you one more thing real quick while we're here we'll do more stuff on I mean there's a lot of useful stuff in these legs but you know we'll do we'll be more on that stuff later I'm not doing how to use all this stuff just how to process the legs right now so Green bone it's almost like hardwood if you have a good hatchet look at that you can just carve it I mean I can just really I can literally carve this like wood if you have an extremely sharp Babylon your hatchet you're going to have trouble and you're going to get chips and your axe plated stuff but kind of a typical typically the way I keep my hatchets that they're not going to suffer any damage at all I mean sure it's going to dull it fairly quickly that's what sharpening stones are for ya see that no problemo now this oil in here besides being good to eat is what neat's-foot oil is made from so that's for oiling leather it's a very fine liquid oil and you have to render it and believe me it takes a lot of these you know if you're using a neat neat means cattle so it's like a cow so neat's-foot oil was from cows which have a lot more of this and it's you know nadir there's really not very much you can use take this out and use it to oil things or whatever but okay so anyway there's a whole bunch of little bones in here the best way to get those if you want to use them for jewelry or decorations or anything is just to bury this and dig it up in a year if you want these big bones uncracked and to be able to use like big pieces of them with no cracks you're better off skinning these out and cleaning them now like I would cut you know this joint apart scrape off all this tissue oil the whole bone thoroughly with like a thick oil preferably and then let it dry slowly because it will crack just like wood will crack when it seasons and for the same reasons which I'll describe some other time so if you want the big bones cut them out now and save them if you want them totally without any cracks now the rest of these bones bury them dig them up in one year and again some other time which I'll tell you about how to clean them from there but that should get all the gross stuff off and they'll just be you know clean bones now if you leave them for two years all the joints like the little fused parts of the bones will start to fall apart and and that's maybe not so good so about a year seems to be about the right amount of time I'm actually going to go ahead and skim this out as if I was going to keep the the dewclaws on the skin and maybe make something with the skin I hear a squirrel over my head squirrel season opens I think next month I'm always excited about that so now I'm going to go down between the toes all the way to the hoof got to take it all the way as far down as you can it's just kind of a pain in the butt to do I just stopped doing a long time ago because I would accumulate piles of these things and then never use them but you know I've made a couple of cool bags over the years okay pull that down as far as I can I'd have to get in here and do a little knife work mostly because it's just really hard to get in here and and pull you know there's not a lot to grab onto as always when using a knife use it carefully and use it as little as possible kind of a rule for skinning least adir animals like that sit down here at the fifth I'm just going to go right up to the hoof oops and I could never be a taxidermist I just don't have the patience for it people in their first starting out with this stuff always want to skin like everything you know the whole face and ears and it just takes forever oh my god not my idea of a good time you got to get right down in here you got to be careful so eventually you're going to get to a joint like I said there's a triangular shaped bone inside of the hoof and you can leave that so I'm just poking my knife in between that joint here I got it I found it I can feel this takes a long time but there it is so you can see that it's neat I mean it's worth doing some time to get like a bag or something you kind of need four of these you you know the back legs are different than the front legs so you kind of need to do to get you like four front legs or four back legs anyway you can do this two ways you can also split it this way and have the hooves out here which i think is actually kind of cooler okay so I got all my parts laid out here the hooves the skins here's the lower leg skin tacked to a board it's all ready to go just dry it like that you know i whittled off a few pieces of tissue but other than that I just leave it the way it is and dry all that stuff on there now this stuff and the sinew are vulnerable to attacks by insects like the same laws that eat wool and beetles these beetles that eat skin so that can be a problem in storage but you know that's just how it goes everything's temporary this bracelet is made from the bone inside the little dewclaws here and this is a rattle these rattles are just really common all over the world using different types of hooves it might be deer goes pig sheep I don't know whatever here's a guitar strap spiky guitar strap head with the bone from inside the hoof like that cool stuff and yeah once the the legs are buried and dug up in a year you can get all these little different bones there's a bunch of cool little bones in there you can use for clasps and buttons and beads and stuff like that that's it for today you

Channel: SkillCult

Views: 47,998

Rating: 4.9328957 out of 5

Keywords: deer legs, deer hooves, removing hooves, removing sinew, processing deer legs, deer leg skin, hock skins, dewclaws, removing deer hooves, paleotechnics, processing deer, deer skinning, skinning deer, how to remove leg sinew, sinew removal, tendon glue, animal glue, hide glue, deer bones, cleaning deer bones

Id: 0ptw_Lf7CiM

Length: 16min 37sec (997 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 20 2016