Tuesday, January 2, 2018

Photo Update 2017 Part 5: Hide Tanning

Deer, coons, and a groundhog I'm vegetable-tanning. In the background is one of our horseradish patches.

Hide Tanning

In 2016] I lived amongst hide-tanners and had very few of my own hides... and I felt really sad. So I stored up hides for this year and started tanning... but not like at a tan salon. Coons, groundhog, and possum were roadkill, the bearhide came from hunters, and deer mostly from deer processing facilities, and also friends.

Bark / Vegetable Tanning

I know of two main kinds of hide tanning. One is called bark or vegetable tanning, where I use tannins in Eastern Hemlock tree bark, Winged Sumac leaf, or other plant parts to preserve the hide for long-term use.

To veg-tan a hide, you moisten it if dry, and then put it in a tannin solution. What is a tannin solution?

You find plant matter that contains lots of tannins, then get those tannins into water somehow, then put the hide into that tannic water solution until its tanned.

The first way I learned was to find fresh Eastern Hemlock tree bark from a dead tree, pound it into powder+small chunks, and then boil the pounded bark. I pounded the bark with unpowered hand tools, but you could use a bark shredder. Here's what a bark boil looks like: 

A tanning bark-boil: each pot is stainless steel, as iron in mild steel seems to react with tannins to reduce the strength of the solution.
The total capacity of those 3 pots is ~15 gallons, and I'd boil each amount of bark 3 times, which would yield "first boil" solution, the strongest, "second boil," medium-strength, and "third boil," the weakest.

I won't give a whole how-to on vegetable tanning, but the summary is that I soak the hides in the solution until the tannins penetrate all the way to the middle of the hide. 

Here are some pictures:


The above and below pictures are of a raccoon. I dried it on my truck hood, not nailed to a wall, so it's not very flat and I found it hard to get a good picture.



When I get a fresh hide and I'm not ready to tan, I dry the hide like above. Either way, when it's time to bark or veg-tan, the hides start to look like this:

A raccoon hide, still moist from the tanning solution. It's resting on a deer hide.

 Here's my bark-tan hide collection on display: at my peak tanning period this year, I had 3 deer hides, 2 raccoons, and a groundhog tanning simultaneously. Each tans at a different rate, and none of them tan at a constant rate anyway. I inspected and worked each hide for a few minutes every day. I've been talking with others tanners to figure out less time-intensive practices, but this is what I did:

For each hide, each day I would first taste the tanning solution and estimate how astringent it was - this would tell me how much tannin the hide had soaked up the previous day, and how soon I would need to make new solution to continue the tanning process.

Then, I'd remove the hide from the container, hand-squeeze solution out of the hide, and lay the hide over the table (not with the other hides around as shown in the photo). Then I'd use the triangular scraping tool shown to squeeze solution out, which also removes some of the membrane, a layer on animal hides which blocks tannin penetration.


The hide lower in the image there comes from a groundhog. Underneath it, visible at the top of the picture, is the underside of a raccoon hide, hair-down.
I kept the hides in tannin solution 'til tannins had moved all the way through the hide, then I removed them and oiled them until they were totally dry - finito! I have no pictures of oiling, 'cause oiling and picture-taking do not go well together.

Piss Poor

Here's a fun hide-oiling cultural reference I learned:

Centuries ago, tanneries would pay people for their urine because they could use it to help remove excess oil from hides. What sort of people would piss in a bucket and sell it to tanneries? The poor, of course - and that's where the phrase 'piss poor' came from. I piss in buckets to help with tanning, but I don't sell it... I probably would if someone were still paying for it though.


The pictures above and below show a finished bark-tanned raccoon hide. I didn't skin the face. The hairless spot is the neck, a notoriously difficult but not impossible spot to keep the hair on during the tanning process.


Brain tanning

Brain-tanning deer hides yield "buckskin," the soft leather that makes such wonderful clothing. If you ever wondered why we call dollars "bucks," it dates back to when buckskin leather was a big product and export of American-British colonies.

I don't have pictures of all the various stages: drying (optional), bucking, graining, neutralizing, acidifying, membraning, oiling, softening, smoking.

But I have a few pictures: drying, dried, and the final product!


 This is a deer hide which I soaked in ash solution for a few days, then gently removed the hair from. I nailed it to an outhouse wall to dry. Sometimes I just throw the hide on a roof to dry, but it doesn't stretch out as well and doesn't lay as flat, making it take up more space in storage. Stretching it out is the way to go!

A dried deer hide. I use a cleaned-out 55 gallon gasket-sealing metal barrel to store my hides in. It's the red barrel the hide is resting on. The green one in the foreground I use to store winter gear throughout the year so it doesn't get moldy.


Here are two finished buckskins. The difference in color comes from smoking one side much longer than the other - each hide shown above has one heavily-smoked side and one less heavily smoked side.

Tanners smoke hides to preserve their softness even when they get wet. Long-time tanners have told me differing things: some say once the color changes during tanning, it's fully smoked and you can stop. Others say you want to really smoke it dark so it stays smoked and water-repellent for a long time. They tell me folks who say otherwise learned from natives who lived in dry areas and didn't deal with much moisture.

As with many efforts to learn from the natives' wisdom, I'm having to ask the same question many times and then experiment heavily as I figure out what works for me now and here.

I decided to put off crafting with my new hides to winter, since fall was so busy.

This is part of a series of posts describing my living situation (Wild Roots) and projects this summer and fall 2017: