STROPS FROM SCRATCH #7: Finishing the Tanned Deer Leather, Oak Bark Tanning

all right it's fine too long we'll get to that in a second we're going to take it out clean it up stretch it out maybe oil with some dry it and then hopefully it'll be ready for the extra project I put this in a long time ago and I would have preferred to have overhauled it checked it added new bark or new Clark solution quite a long time ago actually but I have some concerns that it's been in too long it will still be leather and it will still be useful leather I can say that but if it'll be the kind of leather I want or have suffered no degradation at all from sitting in there for so long I don't know I don't have any doubt that there was enough tannic acid to tan the hide all the way through it's not just a matter of whether there's enough fanon to finish the process but if it's going to sit in there ideally it would be in a strong solution and I'm sure it's not that strong but we'll find out when we get in here [Music] so it's packed away in shredded oak bark and panting solution and actually looks like some of the water evaporated or leaked out which is bad but that if this part wasn't completely submerged wow there's really quite a bit of liquid missing well toasty bath and surprised actually I thought most of it filling the solution now and here's some solution so far the hide looks okay it's a pretty big old thick dear high here but I wouldn't be surprised if we get some discoloration I can actually kind of see some difference in color up here yeah right there where it wasn't completely covered in solution there we go now I already knew that this hydrostan through enough but this is how you check it if you're not sure and cut in you know a ways to that's like 3/8 of an inch in you're just looking for a solid color like that if it wasn't finished handing there'd be a white line to the center where the tannic acid hadn't reached yet there's still color there's still like a dye and tanyka like unbound tannins in the skin I want to get rid of that stuff and then oops this is from leaving the metal rusty metal tool against the hide bad idea so I want to remove any extra tissue here you see that stuff coming off it comes off really easy now getting that stuff off will make a nice smooth flush side as tough as weak it's not it's not doing anything for us as you can see there's kind of liquid stuff coming out of the hide we probably don't want in there see how clean that is now and look at all this stuff we don't want that's like the old flush side so we call it membrane hypodermis and I'm going to spend a little bit of time on this because I do want this side really clean I may do it twice I'm not sure that you can see there's still little this is stuff coming off of here [Music] all right so I'm going to explain what we're going to do here and I'm just laying here because I don't feel like moving the camera and setting it up again I have to hide draining on the beam over there and I'm going to go scrape the flash side one more time but I want to push the water out so I want to push the extra water out because I just rinsed it a couple more times I'm gonna explain to you what I usually would do and then I'm gonna explain kind of what I'm thinking I'm going to do and we'll just kind of adapt as we go when the high comes out it's a little bit shrunken and it's not flat because the skin doesn't really want to be flat right I mean it came off of a ground animal the animals all oddly shaped and so the skin isn't flat but usually to make stuff out of leather we tend to want it to be more flat so I'm going to use these two tools right here to try to get it flattened off this is a metal scraper but it's fairly no it's not a sharp metal paper and this this is a piece of slate with a polished rounded edge that is used for polishing stretching the skin first I'm going to do is lay it on this hard surface it's just a big sheet of plastic you could use plywood or stone or whatever and I'm going to go over the flush side with the metal scraper and try to push out more liquid and get to hide kind of stretched out like start to even out the wrinkles and get the hide stretch because in the tanning solution the hide tends to shrink down because the tanning solution is a stringent you know it's puckery like if you were to bite and chew on a piece of bark it would pucker your mouth well it puckers the skin in the same way okay so normally what I do is I take this which is a mixture of tallow and olive oil and that can be goat fat deer fat cow fat cheek fat elk fat all of those are talos and I mix this with about one-third of olive oil which is a fine lighter oil so that's called devon it's a mixture of tallow which is an oil that's usually hard at room temperature next with an oil that's usually liquid at room temperature I would take that and smear it on the flesh side and then flip the flesh side over and stick it to a board like a sheet of plywood or something and then oil the grain side the hair side and go over the hair side with this and this this is called a slicker and it's just this real polished snoot edge and it'll squish and smash the grain smooth and flat in some cases if the grain is willing to do that which it isn't always and it probably won't be in this case but we'll get to that and it's and I'll use this to just really stretch the skin out and get it really flat and paste it remember I put this on the flesh side it actually paste it and sticks it to the board and it stays there and it stays flat and if you dry it slow it'll stick to the board and stay flat and dry flat you can actually lift the board and set it vertically and the hide won't fall off with it if you do it right but since I'm tanning the side to do axe drops and I'm going to glue those to the board so it's going to be a small board with a piece of skin glued to it I don't really want or need that fat and I'm concerned that the fat especially since I'm making those pretty soon is going to you know interfere with the glue sticking the skin to the board now I can clean that with alcohol and that's what I usually do and it'll probably be fine but I'm just thinking why bother like I probably don't need that fat at all so what I'm going to do is I'm not going to finish the skin the way I usually do but I'm just going to take it I'm going to use this on the flesh side I might use this a little bit on the grain side I'll get it as flat as I can reasonably with the reasonable amount of effort and then I'm going to nail it to a wall and just let it dry slowly look how much stuff is coming off still so I'm going to do a pretty thorough job you can see there's a lot of water coming in out so that's good that will decrease drying time and just make the hide easier to handle if it doesn't how about water [Music] okay you see what I'm talking about here it's not flats and start with this scraper kind of work from the middle out just start trying to get this thing a little flatter looks like I got it pretty dry with the scraper on the beam so that's not a problem this thing in shape this is made from stainless steel it's not it's not a you know feel that you can sharpen it's just like sheet metal I just described the sheet metal because it's never made really sharpening in old days this might have been made out of like iron or bronze it's stainless of the fabric and it's not going to stain the skin any iron that touches the skin like we saw here this is a permanent stain for me setting the scraper down and forgetting that it was Nana roughly stainless powder if you can get it see doesn't want to be flat [Applause] and really it's in the process after I would add fat to the flesh side and stick it to the board and then start working over the grain side with this that I could start to get these pasted down pretty flat but even then sometimes there's some wrinkles that you just can't get out and again most of the skin is slot that's fine for our purposes right now and I can always decide to do something else with the whole skin or part of the skin later just start over with some full process you know real ettus oil and how I on it why I want it or instead I could soften it a lot swaps apply a professor here there's one more thing I want to talk to you about if I wanted this grain to be smooth I would actually need to oil it and compress it with the flicker of this tool right here because it's not flat and it never is completely flat and smooth and that actually requires some effort on my part I could see if I can try to get it a little bit smoother but the other thing about this is its ear skin which tends to want to have this kind of wrinkled elephant skin texture anyway and it's actually it's often difficult to get it completely flat it just doesn't want to be flat so I'm just going to ignore that completely for now chances are if I end up using this hide for the straps I'm going to use this section where the grain got damaged when the deer was drugged by the hunter and I went ahead and scraped all the grain off of that section that's probably the section we use and this would be the surface that you actually shop on that's that's what I'm thinking anyway so let's go nail this to a wall and we'll just let it dry as long as it takes preferably slowly now I have no idea what I'm going to do with the rest of the skin I'll probably just throw it in the pile until actually need it for something and then I can finish it out however I want or I'll use it for videos to demonstrate things just not going to flatten out no matter what I do if he's nails there's just no way I need to paste it out and work the work this side a lot to get it even close to flat but if you work on it real hard on a board like that with oil on this side working it with the slicker you can actually get a surprisingly flat like your first your life is not wet and then you keep working at it and eventually you get most of this one what I really need to do is redo this whole series and gear up towards home tanners the way I set this all up to be is not the cordwood challenge and making these stops and stuff just isn't really something that's going to pull in a large audience I mean it's cursory as I'm going over the process really quick this is still probably the best thing on our landing area find on the internet good enough just let that dry we'll be dry by probably halfway through tomorrow it's pretty hot out it's in the full shade but it won't take that long yeah it's leather lots of potential here we'll guess we'll revisit it and at that time feels pretty thought which is pretty much what I expect from deerskin and the way it was treated overall really see you next time [Music] [Music] and they're bad [Applause] [Music] yeah [Music] [Music]

Channel: SkillCult

Views: 58,596

Rating: 4.9250937 out of 5

Keywords: Bark tanning, vegetable tanning, tanning leather, home tanning, tanning hides, tanniing deer hides, how to tan a deer hide, bark tanned leather, tanning deer skins, survival skills, prepping, homesteading, Self Reliance, natural hide tanning, tanning hides naturally, tanning hides with oak bark, barktanned leather, barktanning, how to tan skin, natural leather tanning, drying leather, how to, bushcraft, woodcraft, wilderness skills, primitive skills, instructional

Id: I8NEnfUi480

Length: 18min 30sec (1110 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 30 2017