Curing removes water from the hides and skins using a difference in osmotic pressure. Preparing hides begins by curing them with salt to prevent putrefaction of the collagen from bacterial growth during the time lag from procuring the hide to when it is processed.
#Tanning cow hides for boots skin
This can be done by the tanner, or by obtaining a skin at a slaughterhouse, farm, or local fur trader. When an animal skin is to be tanned, the animal is killed and skinned before the body heat leaves the tissues. The tanning process begins with obtaining an animal skin. The fur has been left on, apart from small patches exposing leather. As the skin was stretched, it would lose moisture and absorb the agent.įollowing the adoption in medicine of soaking gut sutures in a chromium (III) solution after 1840, it was discovered that this method could also be used with leather and thus was adopted by tanners. In some variations of the process, cedar oil, alum, or tannin was applied to the skin as a tanning agent. Historically the actual tanning process used vegetable tanning. Among the kinds of dung commonly used were those of dogs or pigeons. Bating was a fermentative process that relied on enzymes produced by bacteria found in the dung. Once the hair was removed, the tanners would "bate" (soften) the material by pounding dung into the skin, or soaking the skin in a solution of animal brains. After the hair was loosened, the tanners scraped it off with a knife. Hair was removed by soaking the skin in urine, painting it with an alkaline lime mixture, or simply allowing the skin to putrefy for several months then dipping it in a salt solution. Then they would pound and scour the skin to remove any remaining flesh and fat. First, the ancient tanners would soak the skins in water to clean and soften them.
Skins typically arrived at the tannery dried stiff and dirty with soil and gore. Indeed, tanning by ancient methods is so foul-smelling that tanneries are still isolated from those towns today where the old methods are used. įormerly, tanning was considered a noxious or "odoriferous trade" and relegated to the outskirts of town, among the poor. Around 2500 BCE, the Sumerians began using leather, affixed by copper studs, on chariot wheels.
Tanning was being carried out by the inhabitants of Mehrgarh in Pakistan between 70 BCE. Despite the linguistic confusion between quite different conifers and oaks, the word tan referring to dyes and types of hide preservation is from the Gaulic use referencing the bark of oaks (the original source of tannin), and not fir trees.Īncient civilizations used leather for waterskins, bags, harnesses and tack, boats, armour, quivers, scabbards, boots, and sandals. (The same word is source for Old High German tanna meaning 'fir', related to modern Tannenbaum). These terms are related to the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European * dʰonu meaning 'fir tree'. The English word for tanning is from medieval Latin tannāre, derivative of tannum ( oak bark), from French tan (tanbark), from old-Cornish tann (red oak). Good luck with it.Peeling hemlock bark for the tannery in Prattsville, New York, during the 1840s, when it was the largest in the world Made it hard for a 5' 4" or 5'6" women to scrape from on top of a step ladder. Judy McDowell specialized in cow hide rawhide for parfleche and boy howdy were the frames tweaked out of true. When dried it will shrink and twist the hide and frame from being flat. Even stretched tight around a 4 x 4 or 2 x 6 frame, the frame will need to be staked down on the bottom and lashed to a sturdy bar on the top. I don't think cowhide will work very well with brains even it is bucked with lime, lye or potassium hydroxide. Don't know if the salt and vinegar (acetic) acid tan will work any better than alum. Would be convenient if you had a couple and spare blades. You would have to pay a commercial tanner to split it and depending on the cow hide's thickness, possibly ruin one of the two resulting splits.Ī super razor sharp and thick enough blade for your wahintke (elk antler handled hide scraper) will need to be constantly re sharpened. Hide splitting machines are like a horizontal band saw with toothless blade that separates top grain (hair or epidermis side) from the flesh side (which will have a suede surface on both sides). If you can use a machine (orbital sander as suggested by Quills,) you can sand away some of the chatter marks that will inevitably happen, especially if you haven't been doing a lot of dry scraping. Many of the parfleche in Dances with Wolves were cow, not bison hides. parfleche and shields, boot soles and la riatas. Is the cow hide to be tanned with hair off? Might be better to send it out to be chrome tanned.