How to Tan Rattlesnake Skin

today I want to show you how to go about tanning rattlesnake skin and I've seen a lot of variations with boards and nails and salt and kerosene and quite frankly none of those methods are very good it might be the way your grandfather told you how to do it but I've got a better way I want to show you how to do that today uh eight or nine I was at a rattlesnake roundup showed interest in one of the vendors and he had made the had the pre-made prefab bottle of rattlesnake tanning fluid and uh kind of begged him for the the recipe for a little while and he laughed it off before I left he slid me a little piece of paper with the two ingredients and how to do it on a piece of paper and kind of con conspiratorially slid that to me when nobody was looking and I've been doing this ever since and I'm I'm forever grateful for that but I want to show you the secret a couple parts and pieces to this obviously you need to have the rattlesnakes they're all skinned if you want to know how to do this with any of the snakes you can go ahead and click on the link above that's where I've got the rattlesnake skinning and cooking demo so if you want to know how I've got them to this form and if that big one looked familiar you've already seen that video go ahead and click on the link above I've also got a pickle jar I like using glass it doesn't let a lot of the chemicals soak into it it's Eternal it works really really well for what I'm going to be doing the chemicals used very simple ridiculously simple first one is glycerin and you can buy this at the store it's a preservative uh also used for first aid where I buy it is pretty much uh your horse places your equestrian places your western stores anywhere that has veterinarian supplies you can buy Glycerin by the court and it's a lot cheaper so this is one quart of Glycerin this is enough to do probably 50 or 60 rattlesnakes so you can reuse it quite a bit the other ingredient it's the only two part is 70 to 90 percent isopropyl alcohol that's it those are the two parts whenever you see them selling this stuff up there at the rattlesnake roundups or online that's it one to one mixed up that's what we're gonna do right now go ahead open up my pickle jar and show you how this is done all right so let's mix up some chemicals this needs to be a one to one I'm gonna go ahead and pour all my glycerin in there and although I'm just showing you three of these rattlesnake skins I've got about 20 other ones that have come come to me over the past year people killing rattlesnakes wanting me to do the Skins up or they find them make no mistake I'm not out there killing rattlesnakes all the time rather against that put all the glycerin in there that's one quart you want to go ahead and put your alcohol in there and so this is one quart that's all it's going to take one to one now the the glycerin is going to go ahead and preserve it and it gives that skin just a really nice texture the ice Purple alcohol is going to kill all the microbes and all the things that are going to give your snake skin a bad smell or eventually eat it so it's going to sterilize it it works out pretty well at this point I can mix it up if I want to but in the next step I'm going to mix it anyway so I'm going to go ahead and unwrap the rattlesnake skins and this is the one that I did a video over a few months ago beautiful skin ought to come out real pretty and this has been frozen uh if you've been on the trail and you've you've had to preserve this for a couple of days out on the trail before you got to to Refrigeration a lot of times I would uh I would put salt on them and roll them up just like this if you do have salt or any of the chemicals on this thing you need to go ahead and wash them off you need to wash it off with water quite a bit lots of water lots of water get all that salt out of there okay so that's one doesn't really matter you can put all of them in there all at once I've done up to a dozen of them in one of these jars before and they work out but check out that beautiful skin gorgeous skin we're gonna wrap it make sure it's all out there looking pretty okay you don't want to have any parts folded up or rolled up still where the chemicals can't get to it because that's the name of the game they want to infuse preserve every bit and you can see these these are all diamondback rattlesnakes Crow chalice aatrox and they've all been frozen so I'm gonna guess that this came from uh from somebody else because I'm seeing bullet holes and uh I do see it as as a loss for somebody to go and kill these guys and shoot them this way but if they're going to go ahead and do it and that that creature is dead and gone they might as well bring me the skin and I can I can make something out of it so I'm going to stir this up is your alcohol and your glycerin is not going to gonna mix on their own I'm gonna get everything nice and mixed up and now you play the waiting game uh this container needs to be sealed you're going to wait approximately seven days and it needs to be out of the sunlight seven days once or twice a day come through back and forth a fourth few times and that's it uh second part of this video I'm gonna go ahead and roll over to that and it's going to be seven days from now and I'll show you exactly how we go about stretching these out because they will constrict up the fluid might get a little discolored not very much it's still reusable and we'll give you some more tips and show you how it's done but hope you learned something it's been seven days and at this point you should have already shaken this thing up at least once every single day agitating the ice Purple alcohol the glycerin and your rattlesnake skins for one of the last steps and this is right now you're going to need just one thing and that is going to be a stick okay and it's going to be a fairly rough stick doesn't have to be perfect I'm not going to use the dowel rod uh remember whenever I unwrapped the Skins they were about this wide there's a reason why I'm getting this extra bit of stick here you want to have that and having it rough usually works to your benefit and I'll show you why in just a moment but one stick per skin and this is what you're going to do so I'm gonna go ahead and pull out one of those Diamondback skins kind of let it drain a little bit because even though that doesn't look very appetizing down there I can do a few more snake skins with these chemicals they're not done yet so use them up check out that skin it's not ready yet notice how it's all crinkled up not very pretty can't really sell that can't really use that for crafts just yet so this is what we're gonna do and this works really really well a lot of times I've seen people at this stage of the process go ahead and use a pegboard and use nails you can end up with lots of holes all the way through your snake skin you're going to end up with weird patterns where it waves in and out wherever you had pressure points and where it wasn't tight enough stick method works the best so usually you want to do this with two people but uh there's only one of you you'll find a way what I'm going to do is go ahead up here on the neck which pretty much the whole snake is a neck but up here where the head was connected I'm going to put it on the stick and stretch it out okay as much as possible and it's going to stretch out more and more it looks all crinkly down there but the snake is a pretty good sized snake and this is what we're going to do to be able to get it flattened out and be able to get it where it looks like it's showroom quality or ready to go and be part of your leather working or wall mount or whatever you want to do so what I'm doing here as I do this I am pulling the sides out and you're going to have lots of flexibility here you want to pull them out to the point where it feels like that skin is ripping just a little bit and you don't want to actually feel it tear but the elasticity of a snake remember they can eat some really big things and expand is pretty uh pretty amazing and the further you stretch this as you roll it the better off you're going to be it's a beautiful snakeskin a lot of times I'll actually get a larger stick or a longer stick because of this some of these skins don't look as big or the snakes don't look as big as I can make the Skins become you're just going to keep on keep on rolling notice how wide that's getting to be beautiful snakeskin this is the last step that you're actually gonna have to really put some effort into stuff I've seen a lot of people do this the first time and they have to unroll it do it again go ahead and do it again it's worth it all the way down or just diving back starting to taper down again keep on stretching as you go all the way to the end of the tail that rattle might not work right now because it's got glycerin and alcohol inside of it so not really the the same effect but that'll dry out especially with the alcohol being exposed to the air is going to dry it out and there you go that's the last labor intensive portion of this process you should smell nothing but isopropyl alcohol at this point if you're smelling any kind of Decay or rot it should not have gone into the solution with that smell that means that bacteria are already eating it up and your snake skin might be compromised you want to go ahead and get these snake skins Frozen or in the batch as quickly as possible because they they decompose quite quickly but this is it now I've sealed a lot of Glycerin and a lot of alcohol inside this wrapping it up type I know a lot of people have questions about that but what I'm going to go ahead and do is find a dark room away from everybody else and all I need now is a fan I hang this up I put a bladed fan uh blowing air on it about a day to two days later I can unwrap this it will keep its form it will keep its pliability it won't be crisp it will be nice and flattened out it will be a showpiece and ready for leather work just a fan don't use Sun don't put a heater on it don't try and to speed this process up again the sun is not your friend when it comes to any kind of uh biomatter like leather or snakeskin use the fan and it's going to dry the whole thing out you should have a beautiful snake skin that smells like glycerin which is just a preserving agent it's got that new car smell to it and that's it guys don't want to encourage y'all to go out and kill a lot of rattlesnakes but every once in a while it happens or you've got to remove one off the property where your kids are and this is one of the ways in which you can go and use the skin so the the depth of that snake is not in vain if you'll go ahead and uh look above me I'll have the the link to one of the videos where I actually go and show how to skin and how to cook these rattlesnakes in a very primitive matter Manner and uh I like them they're all over the place here in Texas so you might as well find a use for them but like And subscribe and we'll catch you next time on the next video take care

Channel: Bob Hansler

Views: 247,701

Keywords: Rattlesnake (Organism Classification), Bob Hansler, outdoorsman, survivalism, survival skills, wilderness survival, bushcraft, prepper, tanning skins, how to tan snake skin, how to preserve snake skin, how to tan rattlesnake skin, how to skin a rattlesnake, tanning snake skin

Id: o7GDqH-u-q4

Length: 14min 10sec (850 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 17 2015