Uses of the Deer: Skinning and Drying Leg Skins (hock skins), Primitive arts

I have two legs here one front and one back and I'm going to cut them different what I'm going to cut along the top and one I'm going to cut along the bottom so I'm going to do this one from the upper side helps to have a sharp knife now when you get down here you can see the toe splits so this becomes somewhat difficult so what I did is I cut the toe splits right here and I cut along this toe and along this toe so you have to make a sort of a Y right there now if all you're doing is removing the sinew then you can just kind of tear this skin off really fast and you know nothing really matters but if you're trying to save it you need to wood they don't have to do a little bit of tricky skinning down in here so once you get it started we should be able to just pull most of it off I'm just gonna make a couple cuts here at the top to get it so I can grab it and I'm gonna put my knife down and just start pulling once I can get a good hold of it see what I mean but now the fun starts because we have to skin how all of these folds and stuff so just pull off everything you can just keep pulling get your thumb in there and then as soon as you have to but not sooner start to cut and just be really careful not to cut skin now it down at this joint there's a bone inside of here but you just want to skin it out all the way down here and then we'll cut it and leave that last little triangular shaped bone in here well we'll get to that you'll see what I mean and over here do what you can with your fingers the more use a knife the more likely you are to leave cuts in the skin and you really want to get this down pretty far go all the way down to the hooves and I'm gonna start skinning along the edge of the hoof right here and again over here with the dewclaw just want to skin right up to edge of that hook very close okay we're doing good there so I just need to skin cut this along this edge of the hoof again just like the other side okay now I'm up to the edge of the dewclaw right up there and I can find that last joint there's two joints there's one right here way out here but there's one that's almost inside the hoof a little bit so that's the one you want preferably so really get get in there with the tip of your knife and find that joint there it is that way we're going to leave the minimum amount of you know stuff we'll just be that little triangular bone is all that will be left inside the hoof some people have a lot of patience for this kind of work others don't honestly I don't some people love it they just love sitting there picking the thing apart and seeing how its put together hopefully you're one of those people okay we're just gonna get this one done again trying to find that joint way down inside the the dewclaw these flies are annoying it's September there's a lot of flies in September they're frantic cuz they're gonna die soon it's the last last buzz okay so I just pulled on that we got it skinned down the rest of the way to the foot right here and then we just have to finish this cut all the way around the edge of the hoof you really want to get as much skin as you can because if you're going to use these for any kind of sewing project like a bag or something it's just really easy to if you don't have all the skin that you can get out of it you may just not have enough to make the seams that you want to make there's barely enough room to pull anything off really so take your time to get right up against that hoof and get as much skin as you can I'm just going to come in from the top here I'm getting impatient and there you go if you wanted to make like something out of this bag or something then hose will be here and the next one we're going to skin so the hose are on the outside pretty cool huh okay we're gonna do another one going this way just pull this off get up close to the dewclaws cut the bone off inside the dewclaw just like we did with the other one you don't need to see me do all that so in this case I just cut all the way down it doesn't really form the same quite the same type of why here on the bottom so it just means we're gonna have to approach this slightly different I've got the dewclaws free from the bones and pull this all the way down just skin this real close now this here is actually a planned that emits a scent when the deer steps on the ground that's interesting huh like you think that that would be bad because it leaves like a scent the Predators can pick up and literally if you see a buck walking away you can run up and sometimes you can smell that in the fresh track try it something but apparently it works more as a way for them to communicate that's more important than you know the disadvantage of making it easier for predators to find them I guess I mean if I can smell a predator can probably smell it ten feet away but I have to put my nose right in the track I'm just gonna stretch this out into its natural shape and then trim it all flush so there's the difference let's go tack these out to dry there's the difference there I much prefer this and I don't usually do them this way you really want to go out of your way to do this evenly and get the nails right out the edge so you have plenty of skin to work with if you have to cut those holes off later which you may or may not have to but okay so I'm going to tap that in and I'm going to pull it a little bit then I'm in the top this one in same way just right on edge and then I'm going to pull it out [Music] try to make it similar and when you're doing this with hawk skins it pays to put in quite a few nails you know don't don't skimp too much on the nails and we're just going to use it this one's just gonna be rawhide so it won't change shape when you're using it right I mean it's just gonna be stuff so you have to get it in the shape you want it now that's what I'm getting at that means you want you want this even you don't want it like skewed like that or anything you can see there's just some of these tendon things here you can get try to get those off later if you want to or you can just pull them off but typically I don't do anything when I take them off I just nail them out and drive although sprinkling of borax doesn't hurt that'll keep bugs out because you will get moths and beetles trying to eat this good do not drive these nails in too deep they don't need to be deep in fact you want to be able to take them out pretty easy so just a little bit that's it let that dry so this is dry and that since I put the nails in real lightly all I have to do is kind of wiggle them to loosen em pop them out there we go there's still a little moisture it looks like in here that's unfortunate so I'll probably actually gonna attack this back out and make sure that gets dry because it could change shape you know I want it to stay flat not a big deal though so all this we tack got out over here in a different spot probably won't even put all the nails back just a few of them to keep that flat while it finishes drawing now if you go to make anything with these you'll find that it's very nice to have matched pairs when you look at deer walking around in the woods they all probably look the same to you but they aren't they're very different the coloration is a lot different so the deer standing next to this one is going to have you know different looking Hawk skins so you want to save these in pairs also you probably if you want to make something you're probably need at least four of them like say if you're going to make a bag so you're going to need the same - probably you're gonna want like two sets of front legs so that means you have to have two different deer and they're not always that nice sometimes you get one that's just scruffy like these are all messed up looking so you know a pair of these that are matched and in good condition are somewhat valuable and you can just stash them away for later use now I didn't flush this at all there's a little bit of tissue and sometimes they'll be little tendons and stuff on here you can flush it a little if you want beforehand but be careful because if you apply too much pressure you could start to slip the hair out and you'll lose some of the hair so I usually don't do much of anything there's no flesh there's no fat usually so it's just like it's a section of a deer that really doesn't have any muscles so it's just a few tendons and stuff a sprinkling of borax doesn't hurt that'll keep bugs off because beetles and moths will actually eat the skin if they get into it look rawhide like this it's not canned it's not smoked you know there's nothing really preserving it so it's food for those guys and just a light sprinkling of borax on the flesh side I'll kind of rub it in and then tack it out to dry that works to keep bugs off so if you're making glue with these which they make very good glue you can just take the knife slide it down the top here get it started pull it off down to here and then just cut it off and let it dry and you end up with something like this which is is fine for glue you don't have to tack it out or anything just toss them out in the Sun and let them dry you can cut these into a spiral like you cut it into a spiral strip like this and you can make a long piece of cord out of it to use for a bow-drill fire kit or whatever so that's pretty neat I've never done it but it's a neat idea I want to try that I've also seen people use these as wrist guards for archery so when you shoot a bow sometimes the string will slap you in the wrist it hurts bad enough when it happens one time but if it happens over and over again it can really be not fun so I've seen people use the hawk skin not with the hooves I don't sure how well that would work but laced on here is a string guard you

Channel: SkillCult

Views: 9,786

Rating: 4.9248118 out of 5

Keywords: deer, uses of the deer, how to skin deer legs, hock skins, deer leg skins, tanning, rawhide, primitive skills, primitive arts, indian skills, skillcult, bushcraft, woodcraft, skins, deer skin, deer hooves, deer legs, skinning, drying deer legs, uses of deer, deer skin tanning, deer hide

Id: WY2ao_pMj08

Length: 16min 50sec (1010 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 21 2017