Video Series Following the Oak Bark Leather Tanning Process

Over a pretty long period of time, I made a bunch of run-n-gun videos while tanning some leather. At first I was just going to show this experiment of removing sheeps wool by painting the flesh side of the skin with lime paste. Then I figured I’d just shoot easy videos of the whole process with an action cam Well, that took a lot more time than I thought and EIGHTEEN videos later, here is the playlist. The project was oak bark tanning several sheep skins with the hair off and a big chunk of cattle hide.

While there is a lot of “extra” footage in this very pedantic treatment, there is also a benefit to just shooting what I’m doing in real time. This is barktanning as I do it, with all the mistakes, inconveniences and triumphs of shade tree tanning. There are real life lessons here, vs a more idealized instructional approach of discreet steps that may or may not go as planned. If someone wants to learn vegetable tanning with bark and such, this is a very valuable series, even if it takes a while to get through.

The last two videos are Q&A. I gleaned out a bunch of questions from the comments to try to answer. If one person has a question, it is likely that many others have the same question.

Dealing With Meat Under Varied Conditions, Heat, Aging, Spoilage Prevention

I filled my second deer tag recently and had a carcass to deal with just on the very evening that we entered into a heat wave in late September, with warm nights on top of it.  Fortunatley, I have dealt with this sort of thing enough to know not to panic.  My deer is all in the freezer now and I've been chowing down on delectable venison for days and will be for months to come.  Last night I was chowing down on raw venison that had hung through a warm night with no chilling right after being killed and then through most of a day that reached 103 in the shade, delicious!

For anyone of a homesteady mentality that will be planning to raise and slaughter animals, or who hunts much could probably be helped by this information.  It takes time to build confidence doing this sort of thing and to begin understanding boundaries, but it's great knowledge to have. Everyone used to know this exact type of stuff, because that is what everyone needed to know.  people used to get fresh meat from the butcher and needed to keep it without refrigeration or know how long they had to use it all up before it went bad.  I was looking through a cookbook recently from way back and it had a section on judging meat at the butchers to suss out how fresh it was.  Important skill to have at the time and also now if you choose to put yourself in positions where you need to make due under varied conditions.  I have more to say about this whole subject and things I'd like to expand on or that got missed in the video, but I have to go get ready for rain this weekend.  This video will have to do for now.  It's not a how to kind of thing as much as an expansion of what are probably most people's perceived boundaries regarding this subject.  It is certainly micro-niche information, but very important when you need it.

I also tagged in some neat footage at the end of a couple of yearling bucks play fighting near my house.  Very lucky to have the chance to capture that!

Pocket Axe Strop Production Part 1, Introduction, Liming Hides and Selecting Wood

This is part 1 of my project to build up Pocket axe strops from scratch as incentive/rewards for the Axe Cordwood Challenge.  I may also sell some on the website depending on numerous factors.  For those who don't know, a strop is a device for polishing or refining a sharpened edge.  it is the last step in many sharpening sequences and can also be used to touch up edges, especially if polishing compound is used.  It usually involves leather, which my design of course does, but the act of stropping can also be done on wood or even cloth.  In this project, I'm building strops from the ground up, which involves, tanning, glue making and working up some wood from it's raw log-like state.  There should be no materials used in these strops that were not processed by me here on the homestead, down to the lime and fat used in preparing the leather.  The project will span an undetermined number of videos, as well as a short version of making an easy high quality hide glue from scraps that most hunters or butchers of animals typically throw away.  Almost anyone who is not me should learn a lot from this series and I hope to learn some stuff too! ;)  Feel free to vote on names for the pocket strop or think of new ones... Stropet, Pocket Strop-It, Pixie Paddle (the woods are a dangerous place full of mischievious pixies!).

Preserving Hides for Tanning, Pros and Cons of Salting, Drying and Freezing

Here is a short video about preserving skins for tanning.  I demonstrate salting and talk about other options.  There is so much more to say, but this is a good quick start guide anyway.

Quality Hide Glue From Scratch, #6, Part 2, Cutting and Drying

Here ya go.  I just love the way this glue turns out!  It's pretty fun to sit around and sift my hands through it :DWhen I was first taught how to make hide glue it was always a cloudy stinky mess.  Then I started poring through old technical manuals.  Now my glue looks like a pile of little gems.  There will be one or two more installments coming in this series eventually.  Hey, you may not want to make hide glue now, but I'm building an archive here.  Mark my words, the further people are divorced from reality by an increasingly industrialized society, the more artists and craftspeople will tend to go back to the roots of materials and production.  It's already happening more and more, I'm just ahead of my time.  If I can convince even a few woodworkers to make this amazing glue for themselves and use it or one person to go into production to make small batch artisan hide glue, It will have been worth putting out this series.  You can find videos and stuff on making hide glue, but probably none from the ground up with an eye to high quality, but that's how we roll here- top shelf ya'll.  When the zombie apocalypse comes, you won't be able to go to the pet store to get a rawhide chew toy.  And we don't want to let all that zombie skin go to waste!

Making a Black Jack, Traditional English Leather Mug, From the Ground Up

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The mostly finished mug's virgin voyage.

The video for this post is the visually interesting short version.  I think it turned out really neat and hopefully entertaining, while still giving a glimpse of possibilities.  But it is not intended to be instructional or detailed beyond offering crucial supportive visual information for this post.  This written version on the other hand will be fairly long and rather utilitarian.  It is far from exhaustive, but basically written for people out there who actually want to do this, but who hopefully have some experience with the things involved or can learn some of the necessary skills involved on their own.  So, watch the video first and if you are sufficiently intrigued, you can read more.

I am somewhat fascinated with the idea of leather cups and bottles.  There was a time when leather mugs, pitchers and bottles or flasks of various kinds were rather common in Europe.  There is not a whole lot known about how they were all made, but there are some clues and the mystery just makes it more enticing to me.

The black jack was something of an English icon, and the use of leather mugs persisted beyond what seems reasonable from a practical perspective.  I think so anyway, maybe not.  Now that I’ve made one, I can say it is rather pleasant to drink from and seems pretty durable.  It’s probably not going to shatter if some drunk drops it on the floor, slams it on the table too hard at the end of a draught or uses it to keep time with a drinking song, or all three!  Or what if there’s like some really buxom barmaid with her mammaries threatening to breach her corset carrying a huge tray stacked with a pyramid of Bombards and black jacks and some red nosed drunkard spanks her butt as she’s walking by causing the whole arrangement to be scattered asunder, filling her cleavage with delicious foamy beer?  Maybe I’ve seen too many movies, but I think that shit could’ve happened on a regular basis!  My friend also just pointed out that they are probably a pretty good travel mug, light and not too fragile.  BTW, the first person I showed it to promptly dropped it on the floor, no harm done.  I'm just glad it wasn't full of precious beer!

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Old leather vessels:  Black jack with silver rim, bombards (pitchers) and a leather bottle from John Waterer'sbook Leather and Craftsmanship

I did what research I could and found a couple of useful things.  Wayne Robinson uses a frame for stretching, but I simplified that into two boards, which seems to work fine and is much simpler.  I’m glad I ran into his page on black jacks and got that basic concept, because I had no clue how I would stretch the leather on the form.  His quotes and notes were also very useful.

Then I found Rex Lingwood and his article on working boiled or cooked leather.  He is a very experienced leather artist who hardens and shapes leather by cooking it.  What he does with leather is impressive and not at all expected.  I watched his demonstration on youtube and that was really the key to my relative success with this project. I’d like to thank him for putting information out there for other people to take up and run with.  Thanks!  Here is Rex’s article on Cuir Bouilli, "boiled" leather, also very helpful.

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Leather vessel by Rex Lingwood

We do know that black jacks were made of vegetable tanned leather, that is leather tanned with tannic acid from plant sources like oak bark and many others.  I also think they were baked or boiled to harden them.  They were definitely coated on the inside with some sort of natural waterproofing, most references seem to say it was pitch.

It is the actual process of manufacture that is least well known.  I think it is a safe assumption that basic shaping was done before the sewing.  I also feel pretty sure that all sewing was done before any hardening.  The outside was probably treated with linseed oil and soot, though it may be somewhat more complicated than that.

I decided to shape the wet leather on a form, shape the base separately, dry the parts completely on the forms, then sew it all up, re-wet the whole mug, cook it, re-dry it, seal it with pitch on the inside, and then paint the outside with layers of linseed oil mixed with lampblack.  What I didn’t know till toward the end was how I would keep it from deforming in the cooking phase, but we’ll get to that presently.

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THE LEATHER

I used some bull leather that I had tanned a few years ago with oak bark.  I would not recommend using any commercial leather unless the company is absolutely clear that there are no chemicals or metal salts used in processing at all.  I’m not just talking about not using chemicals to tan the hide.  They may be used in other parts of the process too, I think particularly in dressing the skin with oils which may contain solvents for better penetration, such as neatsfoot oil compound.  I’m not sure what is available out there for truly natural, traditional leather, but it is certainly not much.

I used the neck section, which has a loose fiber and is probably not the best choice.  But, I didn’t want to risk the best leathers that I’ve tanned in this first run.  I had pounded the leather previously and was wondering if any of the black jack leathers were pounded either on forms, or before forming.  I didn’t know, but it seemed like a really good idea to use the pounded stuff.  Pounding leather while it is damp compresses it greatly.  It might end up half as thick and that means twice as dense.  Pounded leather is really cool and something I just started playing with recently after reading things like this quote from an old translation from french:

“This dressing is of great service to the hide, and there is a considerable difference between the goodness of a hide well beaten, and that which has not been beaten; shoemakers who value themselves on the goodness of their work, beat their soles strongly and for a considerable time.”  The Art of Tanning and of Currying and Leather Dressing 1773

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Pounded leather with stone sleeker and ironwood mallet.  The bit on the lower left is the same as the upper piece, but unpounded. 

So I used the pounded section and pounded the base piece as well, though not as thoroughly due to time constraints.  More from me on pounding leather in the future, but the short version is that it is awesome.  Use a heavy and very smooth faced mallet with rounded edges to beat the skin when it is in a slightly damp state, or on and off as it dries.

My leather also varied in thickness.  Commercial leather is often split down to an even thickness.  That is harder for me to do here and I didn’t have time to get it together and shave it down which is a sizeable project in itself.  Parts of the rim turned out a bit thinner than the rest and it tends to deform a slightly, but it’s not a big deal, and especially not for this first run.

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FORMS AND CLAMPS

I had some nice fine straight, close grained fir lying about the yard that I used to make all the forms.  It was so nice that I was compelled to make the two clamping pieces from it instead of using scraps of 2x4 which would have worked fine.  The fir turned well enough on my lathe after roughing out with a hatchet.  I needed three pieces.  One for the main body, one for the bottom and a third to use as a form to shape a metal ring.  The ring is used in conjunction with the bottom mold piece to stretch the leather into shape and hold it while it dries.

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Raw material roughed out to put on the lathe.

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The forms bottom and accompanying ring, and the main form before I cut it all up.

The metal work was a bit of a diversion.  I had to find a piece of metal and set up a forge.  Setting up the forge was possibly the easiest part of that.  I cut a piece of metal tubing that was a little small, turned a piece on the lathe to form it on, set up a forge, grabbed some charcoal from a charcoal trench that I hadn’t emptied from last spring, heated the metal tubing, hammered it wider till it would start to fit over the form, heated it up nice and evenly hot and pounded it over the form to shape it.  Just in case it might want to warp, I cooled it on the form by quenching it in water so it would shrink down to the shape of the wood.  It went very smoothly all in all and could have taken a lot longer.  Back when these vessels were common they didn't have scrap piles with pieces of welded tubing sitting about.  A smith would more likely start with a piece of iron nothing close to the needed shape, beat it out into something they could use, weld it into a ring in the forge and then do what I did.  Not a difficult job for any smith, but more time consuming.

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The metal ring form, post mortem

The body was turned with a flared base.  I like that look a lot and might even consider making the flare more pronounced in the future, though now that it is finished, and shrunken slightly, the flare is more pronounced.  As soon as the pieces were turned I oiled them up with some old lard that was sitting about to help slow or stop any checking (cracking) of the wood as it dried, being especially generous applying it to the end grain.  It was splattering me with moisture on the lathe, so it really was quite wet.

The clamps were hewn out of the split fir slabs with a single beveled hewing hatchet, and briefly planed smooth on the faces that would be next to the leather.  Pretty smooth anyway.  Then they were notched to accommodate the flare at the base of the form.  The edge that would be pinching the leather was slightly rounded.  That is one place where a 2x4 may not be so great since the edges are probably usually too strongly rounded as they come from the mill.

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The clamp boards and the main body form.  Note the notch cut out for the flared base.  Very simple, but not wanting for effectiveness with a couple of good clamps.

I soaked the leather in warm water till it was completely wet through.  some of the work of pounding was reversed in soaking because the skin swells in thickness with water, but I’m sure that work of pounding was not all lost.  After a warm water soak, the thoroughly wetted leather was stretched on the forms using the stretching clamp boards and some nails.  I had to pull the nails once and re-pound them differently to stretch it tighter.  I just used a couple of clamps to tighten it down   I wish I had pulled the nails and redone them one more time to stretch the leather even tighter around the body form, but it turned out fine.   A welt (an extra piece of leather) was sandwiched between the two outside handle layers to increase the handle thickness. 

That metal ring for the base was very hard to pound on over the thick leather.  I lubed it up with some olive oil though and it went on eventually with much pounding.  With everything pounded and clamped together, I cranked up the woodstove, hung the pieces to dry overnight right next to the hot stove, and went to bed!

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STITCHING

In the morning I took it all apart and trimmed the pieces close to where I wanted them.  To insure the pieces wouldn’t shift on me during sewing, I ended up glueing on the base to hold it during sewing and I also glued the three handle flaps together for the same reason. I put in a couple of temporary stitches at the top and bottom to hold it all while I got the first seam finished.  I used hide glue, which is water soluble, but again, only temporary.  I think I made this hide glue from pieces of this same skin.  I ended up using that batch of glue a couple more times during this project.  More on hide glue here.

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Hide Glue Pieces

I have actually done very little of this type of stitching, so I was worried I would be lame at it.  The first seam, had to be the one closest to the body. I have a stitch marking tool, which is a little wheel that marks dots on the leather so you can make even stitches.  They are great.  It seemed like the stitches it marked were a little far apart though, so I doubled them by marking stitches in between resulting in a hole about every 1/8 inch.  That didn’t go too well. With the large thread, awl and needle sizes I was using, it just turned out pretty rough looking no matter how careful I was.  The rest of the stitches are not all perfect, but I’m satisfied.  I still think this stitch wheel is a little wide for this project at 1/4 inch wide, and would guess that 3/16 inch spacing might be closer to ideal.  But it worked fine and the liquid proof nature of a black jack is not from tight stitches, it’s from the pitch coating.

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The stitches up against body in the first seam were definitely too close at 1/8 inch.  The look sloppier and cut into the leather easily.  1/4 inch maybe a little bit long, but workable and they look much better.  The mug still have a brown look now, but it will eventually be dead black as the layers build up.

I got to make a new awl for this project.  I make awls to sell that are basically designed for sewing buckskin.  They are stubby though and a longer handle is better suited to this type of sewing.  Mostly, I had to get that first row of stitches very close to the body, so I knew I'd need a long skinny handle.  I turned the new, longer handle out of some native oak on my lathe and wrapped the tip with sinew to keep it from splitting.  Hide glue was used to paint the area before wrapping and several times after wrapping with time left to dry in between.  After alternate sanding and re-coating with glue several times I put on a final glaze of glue, it is clean looking and very tough.  As long as it stays dry it should perform admirably.  Most leather sewing awls for this sort of thing are shaped like a diamond I think or maybe a triangle.  Anyway, they are faceted so that they cut the leather as they go through rather than just stretch open a hole by parting the fibers like my round awl bits do.  I thought I would compromise and make it faceted at the tip, but basically the same long tapered shape.  I would say it worked pretty good, and honestly, as long you can get the job done with reasonable effort, the less cutting of fibers that happens in leather sewing the better.  So, whether the facets I ground into the tip did anything or not, the awl worked well.

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New awl

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Sinew wrapping.  Some may understandably doubt the ability of this wrapping to keep the wood from splitting, but after shooting blunt practice arrows wrapped like this into stumps, rocks and dirt over and over again, I have no doubts at all.

This stitch uses one long thread and two needles.  The needles are passed through the same hole, from opposite sides, first one then the other.  The stitch lines were marked carefully with dividers and a stitching wheel to offer the best opportunity for keeping the stitches even and straight.

Normally this type of stitching is done in a simple wooden vice.  I have long wanted to make such a vice, but I decided that the cup’s shape was probably too awkward for the vice to be of much use anyway.  Without a vice, the stitching was extra slow.  It took about 1 minute per stitch at the very best, but that is after I got into the swing of it and not including problems or set up time, so two minutes per stitch is probably closer.  At a rough count of 198 stitches, 2 minutes is about 6.5 hours, which seems about right, if not low.  The basic process was to cut the handle to shape with a sharp knife, use dividers to mark the stitch lines, and run the stitch-marking wheel down the line.  This sewing method uses two needles and one long piece of linen thread.  The thread passes from both sides through the same hole.  I often needed pliers to pull it through.  That’s good, I wanted tight stitches anyway.  Once both threads are through, they are both pulled tight.  To finish off, the threads are back tracked down the seam through several holes and then simply cut off flush.I was up sewing till 3:00 am on day two, but the cup was ready for the next stage in the morning.

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COOKING, FORMING, DRYING

I spent a lot of time in the morning reviewing whatever information I could find and finally decided on a plan of attack.  Watching Rex Lingwoods video helped me understand what I might be dealing with when the leather shrank in cooking.  What I decided was to cut the form into several parts, in this case 7.  The center piece would be tapered for easy removal.  That meant I had to cut the base off of the original form and will have to turn a new one with the same size and flared base if I want to use any of the rest of the form in the future.  I was torn between cooking the leather with the form in place or cooking and then stretching it back into shape.  I decided to go with cooking in hot water and then putting the form back in.  I soaked the mug and heated some water to 85º to 90º degrees celsius (185º to 195º F).  I think I could have cooked it longer, but it seems to have turned out fine.  Once the leather shrank quite a bit, I put the form pieces back in and drove them home.  I was really thinking it probably wasn’t going to work, but it did.  Whew! 

I had to push the shrunken leather back up the form and in retrospect would have liked to have done that more.  I just rounded the edge of a hardwood stick to do that.  A clamp of some kind would have really helped.  So, there it was. The form was back inside, though slightly smaller than it had been because the many saw cuts I made took away a little bit of the wood.  That was okay with me.  having a smaller form accentuated the flare at the base and made it easier to put the pieces back in.  I had to dry it fast, so I left it right up close to the very hot woodstove with a fan blowing on it, turning it often.

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The cup dried on the split form.  The deer tail is incidental.

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PITCHING THE INSIDE

While the leather was drying I started messing with pitch formulas.  I thought the pitch should be slightly flexible.  After trying many different mixes of pine pitch, rosin, beeswax and raw linseed oil, I ended up with a beeswax/pine pitch mix.  Now it seems a little soft when it gets warm and I removed it to be replaced with a straight pitch coating.  There is a difference between pitch and rosin.  Rosin is hard at room temperature and is made by driving off the volatile components of pine pitch.  Pine pitch is more gooey and sticky.  Rosin can also happen naturally when pitch sits long enough that the turpentine evaporates naturally.  I had pitch in all stages from fresh to rosin, but favored the stuff that was closest to rosin.  I think a fairly hard coating is probably what is wanted.  Something that is not at all sticky unless heated up, and these vessels are not used for hot liquids.  Pitch loses the solvent portion when cooked in my experience, so just heating it and melting it enough to strain out bark, bugs and pine needles makes it more hard and brittle.  I thought that the brittleness would cause the pitch to crack and flake off.  The mug was a little flexible, but as soon as the pitch cooled inside it, it was quite stiff!  I was surprised that the pitch offered so much to the structure of the mug, and now think stiff pitch will probably not flex enough to crack under normal use.  In truth, I would think that they require some maintenance no matter what anyway.  Since pitch is thermo setting, it can probably just be melted back together if cracked badly.  Or it could just be cleaned out competely and re-coated.

I poured the molten boiled pitch with about 1/5 to 1/4 beeswax mixed in, sloshed it around and dumped it back out a few times.  As the molten pitch cooled a little, it allowed me to get a thicker layer.  I'm not sure what it ideal, that will be learned over time I guess.

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PAINTING THE OUTSIDE

The lampblack for the outer painting was made with a simple oil lamp arrangement covered with a stone plate.  You can read more about lampblack in this blog post.  It’s cool stuff.  The lamp black was mixed with linseed oil to paint the outside of the mug.

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Simple arrangement for making lampblack.  A simple oil lamp with a stone plate set over it.

Accumulated lampblack

There is something that you read about in old technical and formula books called Japaning.  I imagine that term evolve from westerners trying to emulate the fine art of Japanese lacquer ware.  So far as I can tell, it involves various process, most of which use linseed oil, resulting in a shiny enamel like finish.  It was used on tea trays, cars and apparently on black jacks.  It is hard to tell from pictures if all black jacks had that sort of gloss finish, but some certainly did.  Linseed is a drying oil, which means that it cures over time by reacting with oxygen to form a sort of plastic-like film.  Older recipes for this type of finish often call for Japan drier, which is a solution of toxic metals that speed the curing time of the oil, the same metals found in what is now sold as boiled linseed oil.  I’m not going to use toxic metals on a food item, or probably on anything else, but there is a question I have not yet answered regarding whether the metals and other treatments of the oil, like heating it for a period of time in the absence of oxygen, just make it cure faster, or make it cure more thoroughly in the long run.  I plan to test that eventually if possible.  In the meantime, pure raw linseed oil, even the cold pressed food grade stuff from the health food store cures to the touch in a few warm days and seems fine for the things I use it for.   I think I’m going to go as far as I can using just the raw linseed oil and lampblack for now.  For a little more on linseed and other drying oils, see my video on oiling tool handles.

The goal is to eventually have a thick somewhat glossy outer finish.  My basic process for painting the outside will probably be something like, paint on a thin layer, let it cure, then add another and so on.  Maybe I can polish the outside once I build up and cure enough layers.  The oil is best spread thin and allowed to cure.  If it is thin, oxygen can reach it and it will cure faster than a thick layer will.

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I put on two thick layers right off to get the oil to soak in as much as possible and a couple more the next day.  I wanted to get the oil into the skin pretty far so that it would eventually stiffen inside the fiber structure and help harden the mug.  I think I got quite a bit in there.  The layers of oil applied will soak in for a while, then at some point one of the coatings will not soak in all the way because the surface has been saturated and sealed.  This is the point at which you can start building up thin layers on the actual surface.  At least that’s how it works with wood.  This is new territory so we'll see.

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Freshly coated

I put the mug near the open oven on low heat to drive the oil that was sitting on the surface into the leather.  That melted the pitch coating most of which ran out, especially on the hot side, which was basically left with no coating at all.  When I filled it, the mug leaked slightly where the pitch had drained away at the bottom seam.  Otherwise it seemed to work fine and it was actually quite nice to drink out of.  Boy that Racer 5 IPA tasted good after three days of frantic problem solving and work!  There was no off taste as I suspected there might be.  I don’t think I’d mind a little pine flavor in my beer anyway Pine is a common flavor component found in hops.  Actually, I may not have detected it since I was drinking IPA.  I missed the midnight deadline to enter the instructables leathercraft contest by 15 minutes waiting for my hastily patched together youtube video to finish uploading.  It’s probably just as well, because it is pretty rough with missing footage, typos and clips out of order.  The new video posted here is much better put together and contains footage missing from the first one.

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Ye olde black jack bottom

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THOUGHTS AND WHAT TO DO DIFFERENT NEXT TIME

I would like to eventually make a second black jack.  I could do it much faster a second time, especially on the same forms.  I would probably push the boiling further, and use leather that is pared down to an even thickness.  I might also try boiling it with the form in it as a sort of second boiling to set the shape better and harden the leather more.  Actually, I did try that, but I was having technical issues with my water heating apparatus and had to give up on it.  The other option would be to bake it on the forms.  This intrigues me as well and I’m curious enough to want to try it.

Other things I might try or do different.  I would experiment before hand with stitch length, but would guess that 3/16 is going to be about right.  Straight pitch as the coating, with no beeswax or oil.  cutting the handle closer to the stitches after the mug is sewn up (I just think they could be closer, but sewing them that close to the edge might be awkward).  I would make the rim too tall.  You can see in the pictures how it shrunk down making the rim taper down away from the handle.  It may be possible to push it back up enough to get it level, but not without a something to firmly hold it while it is being worked on.  If there were extra leather on the rim it could even be nailed in place to shrink and dry and then trimmed to the desired shape.  A wooden vice to hold the piece while working would be very nice, even if it only worked for some parts.  maybe a special vice to accommodate the fat cup body.  Proper leather stitching needles.  I ordered John James Saddlers stitching needles size 2 on recommendation of Youtube user Ian Atkinson I also just need to bone up on general leather working and stitching skills.  I'm still much more of a tanner than a leather worker, so I may also pick up these two books 1 2 that he recommends and work on those skills.  Lastly, I'm not sure about the outer finish and would like to do some more research and experimentation around "Japaning" with linseed oil to get that high gloss finish.

Another project I'd really like to tackle is a leather bottle of the short keg-like variety as in this picture.  They are so damn cute!  I have ideas on how to make those, but again, we don’t actually know how they were manufactured.  This experience was fun and just the kind of adventurous multi-disciplinary project that I like doing.  Trying to resurrect old technologies from available clues gets me all hot and bothered.  It was extremely time consuming though and ate up most of 3 days.  I think I can figure out the leather bottle thing and will certainly post that as well.  I’m also currently working on recovering the apparently lost art of making genuine old school apple butter, which is very exciting.  I have already compiled hours of research that I’ll be publishing, which probably constitutes, much if not most of the best available references relating to that subject.  I’m also amped up to make a throwing tomahawk out of wrought iron and steel forged and welded in the ground forge that I just built for this black jack project.

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Must replicate adorable antique leather bottle!

Each of these projects takes many hours, or sometimes days, let alone the time required to write it all up, and to plan, shoot and edit video footage.  In order to keep doing all this and building an archive of information here, without having annoying advertising on the website or on my youtube videos, I need to have at least a small income.  If you appreciate this type of information, you can help me keep it up by using my amazon links.  Thanks so much to the people that are already using them, you guys rock!  If you bookmark this link in your web browser toolbar and use it whenever you shop at Amazon, I get a small advertising fee at no cost to you, regardless of what you purchase.  It is usually not much, but if a lot of people do it, it adds up.  I appreciate your support.  If you make a black jack, or have already made one, please let me know!

CHEERS!

How to remove back strap sinew without wasting any meat

Whether or not you want to use the sinew, this is a great way to remove it from the back strap meat. We'll be moving soon!  I'm working on the new website now!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Texv12eY0c4

Skinning Deer and Goats for Perfect Hides and Carcasses

I slaughtered a goat a couple of days ago for meat and used the opportunity to make this video on proper skinning.  I've skinned hundreds of animals to develop this simple strategy, which works well for me.  It could be streamlined by anyone with enough practice and experience, but I think the approach is pretty solid.  Yes, some of you aren't as big or strong as I am and may think this method is not possible for you.  It may take quite a bit longer and you may have to do a little more cutting, but don't give up too easy!  You may have to use the knife a little more, but use it only where you really actually have to and do your best to muscle and technique your way through the rest of it.  Get all up in that carcass and use your bodyweight, and you may be surprised at what you can do!  No need to be a purist.  If you have to use a knife, then so be it, but it seriously takes FOREVER to skin an animal carefully with a knife and you will still slip up and cut the skin sometimes. Countless hides are ruined every day due to poor skinning which is by far and away the norm, even when people are well intentioned.  Share this video with those hunters and animal raisers you know to help change that!  Hides are a valuable resource and tanning is an accessible skill for homesteaders and small farmers.  I'm still working on that tanning book, which is going to make it more accessible than it has every been, but this goat was a bit of a distraction among others.  It's almost processed and put away now, just have to render the fat and salt the skin (which may also be videos) and wrap some stuff for the freezer, then I won't have to worry about meat... at least until buck season opens in a couple of weeks.

This approach is somewhat applicable to lambs and sheep as well, and some parts to skinning almost any animal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-oWBdxxMfA

Peeling Oak Bark for Tanning Leather and Apple Breeding Update

Here are a couple of recent videos I did on the stuff I do around here.  One is a short update on labeling and protecting fruit that was pollinated earlier this year as part of my apple breeding project.  I talk a little about the breeding parents and related stuff, but it's pretty straightforward and short, with a quick visit to my new pig. The second is a follow along while I cut down, cut up, and peel the bark off of a tan oak tree that is infected with the organism involved in sudden oak death.  I use the bark for tanning skins.  I'm working on a book right now on tanning with plant materials like bark, various leaves and pods and stuff like that.  Writing, research and experiments around that project now consume most ofmy time, energy and thought.  In the video I show a few pieces of leather tanned with oak bark, peel the bark, split the wood and clean it all up.  There are few things I'd rather do with my time than that type of forestry work.  Splitting wood, playing with wood, using my axe, burning brush to make charcoal, etc..   is all my idea of a good time!  woo hoo!  It's really hard for me to cut these videos down and focus them in.  There are so many satellite topics I want to talk about!   Definitely some stuff coming on axe use, wood splitting tutorials, forestry and forest ecology, and lots of tanning and skin working stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNFZiu4mSts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX8g0Yt0ZmI