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.

Finishing the Oak Bark Tanned Deer Leather

Cute and practical, just how I like 'em!

Last winter I started a project oak bark tanning a deer skin to make leather for the axe strop project.  The project follows the collecting and processing of materials to build pocket sized sharpening strops as prizes for people who completed the Axe Cordwood Challenge.  I'm making everything I need for the strops and decided to show the whole tanning process and everything else in a series of videos.  Almost 6 months ago, I laid the prepared skin away to tan in oak bark.  It sat in there about 4 months longer than it needed to, but I took it out and finished it this week, and it looks like it turned out pretty decent.

The leather is perhaps a little light and spongy, "Empty", as they say in the tanning trade.  Emptiness results from the loss of structural proteins in the skin by chemical or bacterial action.  It isn't much of a surprise considering that I over-limed it to start with, and that it sat in a weak vegetable tanning (plant based) solution for 4 months longer than it needed to.  Those are actually the type of things that a tanner might do on purpose to a hide in order to make the finished leather soft and pliable.  That's not what I was planning though.  I would prefer a rather firm and weighty leather for this project, but that is not even the nature of deer to start with.  Deer skin, at least our deer skin here in the Western U.S. has an open, coarse-fibered, low density character that lends itself well to softened leathers.  It would have been better to move it through the process faster with shorter liming time.  But, a process that uses somewhat preservative solutions like lime and tannin, begs for procrastination.  Add that I have to make videos of it all and it's a perfect storm for not getting things done in a timely manner.  It will probably work fine for the project, but I haven't assessed it closely yet.  If it doesn't work out, I have plenty of other skins I've tanned over the years that are suitable and I got to show the process start to finish, with some of the warts and mistakes that any home tanner is likely to experience.

The next steps will be making the wooden paddles, making glue and putting it all together into the finished product.  I only need a small amount of leather for the project.  Seven brave and industrious individuals chopped one cord or more of firewood for the cordwood challenge using axes only and will receive a finished strop and a leather patch when they are made.  The balance of the leather will be stowed away with the rest of my leather cache, to wait for a suitable project.

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!).

How I Process Deer Legs for Sinew, Skins, Bones, Hooves and Glue Stock

There are a lot of useful parts in the lower leg of deer and similar animals. I've processed many of them over the years while skinning deer for hunters.  When you're faced with a pile of 70 or 80 of the things you have to cut to the chase and giterdun.  Here are a few pointers for the would be leg dismantler.

Quality Hide Glue From Scratch, #6, Part 1, Cooking the Glue

I missed a Saturday video on youtube, but hopefully I'm back on track now.  This Saturday's video is Installment 6 in the hide glue series that I started last year.  I had to divide this one into two videos since it was getting really long and I'm still finishing up.  It may not make sense to people to have two parts in one installment, but cooking, pouring, cutting and drying are really sort of all the same step to me since they have to happen in a short space of time.  Part 2 should be out within a week.  The glue is looking great if I do say.  This batch will be for sale in the webstore starting tomorrow when it will be dry enough to package.

Oak Gall Leather Tanning Experiments and the horrible horrors of Case Hardening

I picked some fresh oak galls to extract juice from this spring.  When fresh and green in April, our large oak galls from the California Valley White Oaks are very juicy and exude a clear liquid when squeezed.  I put a piece of skin in the straight juice to test it and it case hardened, a phenomenon where the skin is shocked by the extreme astringency, becoming shrunken and stiff.  In case hardening, the outside surface of the skin is so tight and contracted that the tanning stops or proceeds slowly because new tannin can't penetrate to the interior of the skin.  In the video, I discuss the fact that fear of case hardening often leads to just the opposite problem, which is far more common, not using enough tannin.  The experiment also provides a few other talking points.

Ira's Handmade Gourd and Rawhide Ukelele

Ira came to help out up here at Turkeysong today and showed me the Ukelele he's working on with a gourd box and rawhide drum skin.  It's pretty neat!  You can check out his new project at youngartistsactionleague.com  and  he taught this at Saskatoon Circle Gathering put on by some friends of mine in Washington state.  Thanks for the tune Ira, and thanks for the help!

Video Series on Making Quality Hide Glue

I'm shooting a video series on making high grade hide glue.  At least that is the goal, we'll see when I test the glue after it's finished, or maybe have it tested by someone else.  The third video, on liming, is uploading to YouTube as I'm typing this.  The approach is a sort of learn as you follow along kind of thing, going through the process of turning a cattle hide from Tamara's recent cattle processing class into hide glue.  Every time I go to work on the skin, I take some video and edit it down.  One section is sort of a lecture type deal with some chalkboard action, one is on fleshing and, aside from the liming one uploading now, the others will be de-hairing and de-liming, cooking and pouring, then finally cutting and drying.  Maybe at some point there will be one on testing the finished glue.

This hide glue series will be fairly long, but there are things in there to learn beyond making hide glue.  Little snippets about other stuff relating to tanning skins and such inevitably work their way in.  No process is an island after all.  So far these videos have been decidedly lacking in popularity and the total number of people that really get a lot out of this will probably not be that many.  But it will be there when people are ready for it, and that is most of the reason I do this stuff at this point, as a reference archive and so it doesn't all die with me one day.  Personally, I think it's really cool, even though I've so far mostly restrained myself from going on long tangents about multiple related processes and ideas.  Poking around looking at other hide glue videos on youtube, a lot (or most?) of them use rawhide chew toys cut up in pieces.  Nothing wrong with that in context I suppose, but that has never been what we, or the genesis of Paleotechnics, has ever been about.  I'm definitely bringing you something closer to the ground up version.

The link below goes to the main Playlist into which all videos in the series will be placed as they come out.  I think anyone with any kind of google account, like Gmail, can subscribe for updates.  My channel, for now, is a mixed bag of stuff I get up to.  I'm also currently also doing a series on amateur apple breeding, which will follow my progress over the years attempting to breed up some new red fleshed apples here at the Turkeysong experimental homestead.  For the hide glue series,  I'm in the dehairing/refleshing/deliming process now, so that one should be up soon.  When finished, I will probably sell the glue on Etsy.  If that works, maybe I'll add artisan hide glue making to my list of little income sources.  Artisanal hide glue for artisanal artisans, you know instrument makers, fine artists who use traditional materials, fine woodworkers that want their furniture to be fully repairable in the future and the likes of them.  People who are keepin' it real!  See ya...

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