Acid tanning rabbit hides archive#
Acid tanning rabbit hides skin#
Acid tanning rabbit hides free#

If you are lucky, a hide sometimes needs hardly any work at all, but have a good scrape at it anyway just in case you haven't spotted the membrane.

Acid tanning rabbit hides skin#

Do your best to clean up the hide properly, but if you really have a small stubborn bit, don't panic, you will have another chance to scrape it once its been in the pickle- but you need almost all the skin clean for the stuff to work properly. You will find that the membrane will pull away in sections if you work at it patiently. The easiest way seems to be to use a section of log or similar as a support, stretching the hide hair down around it, and working over small sections of the skin side at a time, picking or scraping off the bits to leave a smooth surface underneath. You MUST get as much of this off the hide as possible before curing it. Two: The hide may well still have small scraps of flesh, or a whitish membrane with tiny blood vessels in it adhering to the skin. This stage will make you much happier to get good and close to the hide in the next stage! Hang it up to drain until you can handle it easily. If you can't put it in the bath, get it on the lawn and shampoo and rinse both sides thoroughly. Even if its been skinned perfectly it will still have an animal reek to it, and that will get stronger as the hide ages.  Rubber gloves- optional but handy if its your first hide!įirst, give that hide a wash.  Vegetable oil (additions of essential oils optional, but we like to add a bit of cedarwood oil for a nice smell)  Something to use as a frame, you can improvise this or even do without in a pinch  Alum (most chemists either stock this or will order it- they sell it to treat bedsores)

 Section of log, or something convenient and rounded  Very sharp knife that you can handle comfortably  Large bucket with a lid (plastic dustbin for example)  1 freshly skinned hide- the fresher the better though we've had good results with frozen or salted hides as well. Small skins like rabbit won't take as much abuse as a large one, so just be gentle with them- big hides may need a little assistance from friends when you come to stretch them.

For the article below, I'm talking about a deerskin but this will work on most animals, just scale up or down accordingly. It leaves the leather side white and the hair side stays unchanged.

Acid tanning rabbit hides free#

This is a quick, easy and almost totally smell free way to deal with fresh hides. Tanning a hide- 10 easy steps to a well cured pelt or hide. I posted this elsewhere too in response to a question, but reckoned it might be useful on this forum as well- its only one of an enormous range of ways to cure a hide, but its a good one if you have never done it before!

Acid tanning rabbit hides archive#

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