Rawhide and tanning a skin

Two different crafts share this page and it is worth separating them at the start, because one is a weekend and the other is a season.

Rawhide is a cleaned, dehaired, dried skin. It takes a few days, it needs no chemicals, and it produces one of the most useful materials there is for lashings, repairs and hard-wearing parts.

Tanning chemically changes the skin so it stays soft whether wet or dry. It takes weeks to months, it is genuinely laborious, and it produces leather.

Most households would get more out of rawhide than out of leather, and almost everybody attempts the leather first.

Rawhide or tanned, and which you need

Rawhide's shrinkage is its whole advantage. Wrapped on wet and allowed to dry, it contracts hard and grips like nothing else. That is how axe heads, tool handles, sled joints and repairs were bound for centuries, and it makes a joint that no cord can match.

Its weakness is water. A rawhide binding that gets thoroughly wet goes soft and lets go, and rehardens when it dries. For anything permanently outdoors, that matters.

The hygiene, which comes first

Fleshing and dehairing

Both crafts start the same way.

Fleshing is removing every trace of meat, fat and membrane from the inner face.

1. Work fresh, or salt the hide heavily and dry it for later. A hide left wet and warm spoils within a day.
2. Drape it over a fleshing beam, which is a smooth debarked log at waist height, hair side down.
3. Push a blunt scraper away from you along the hide. A drawknife with the edge dulled, a purpose-made fleshing tool, or a shaped hardwood scraper.
4. Blunt, not sharp. A sharp blade cuts through the skin, and a hole in the middle of a hide is permanent. This is the one place in the app where a blunt tool is correct.
5. Get everything off. Any membrane left will stop the tan penetrating and will rot.

Dehairing by soaking loosens the hair so it scrapes off.

• Bucking, the traditional method, soaks the hide in a weak alkali solution: wood ash lye or slaked lime, for several days, until the hair slips when rubbed. See lye from wood ash and take every warning on that page seriously here too.
• Plain water soaking works more slowly and smells considerably worse.
• Then rinse thoroughly and neutralise, because alkali left in the skin ruins the tan and is harsh on the hands of whoever uses the leather.

Leave the hair on if you want a fur, which skips this step and changes the whole process.

Making rawhide

The simple version, and the one worth doing first.

1. Flesh it thoroughly.
2. Dehair it, unless you want hair on.
3. Rinse well.
4. Stretch it on a frame, laced with cord through holes punched round the edge, under even tension.
5. Dry it in the shade, with airflow, out of the sun. Sun-drying makes it brittle.
6. It goes hard, translucent and board-like. That is rawhide.

To use it, soak it until pliable, cut it to shape wet, wrap or fit it, and let it dry in place. It shrinks and hardens where you put it.

Store it bone dry. Damp rawhide rots and is attractive to rodents and insects.

What rawhide is good for

• Lashings that must not move: axe heads, tool handles, frame joints, sled and cart repairs.
• Hinges, which is the traditional gate and box hinge in a place with no ironmongery.
• Handles and grips, wrapped wet and dried on.
• Drum heads and containers, formed wet over a shape.
• Cordage and thong, cut in a spiral from a single disc to give a long continuous strip.
• Repairing a split tool handle, wrapped tight and dried, which holds far better than tape and is the reason to have some.

Bark tanning

The real, durable, traditional tan, and it is a project measured in months.

Tannins come from bark: oak is the classic in Britain, and willow, birch and spruce all work. Shred the bark, steep it in water for days or weeks, and you have a tan liquor the colour of strong tea.

1. Prepare the hide: fleshed, dehaired, rinsed, neutralised.
2. Start weak. A hide put straight into strong liquor tans the outside and case-hardens, sealing the middle so it never penetrates. Begin with a dilute bath.
3. Strengthen it gradually over weeks, adding fresh liquor or moving the hide to progressively stronger baths.
4. Move the hide every day or two so the liquor reaches everywhere and nothing sits folded.
5. It is done when a cut edge is uniformly coloured all the way through, with no pale line in the middle. That takes weeks for a thin skin and months for a thick hide.
6. Rinse, then fatliquor: work oil or fat into the damp leather to lubricate the fibres.
7. Soften while drying, see below.

It smells, at length, and the spent liquor is a genuine nuisance. Do it well away from the house and dispose of the liquor on rough ground, never into a watercourse or a drain. Tannery waste was regulated for centuries for exactly this reason.

Brain tanning

The method most written about and the one most romanticised.

The principle is real: emulsified fats and lecithin, traditionally from the animal's own brain, are worked into the fibres to keep them from bonding as they dry. It produces soft, pale, supple buckskin.

It is not a chemically stable tan. Brain-tanned skin will stiffen if it gets soaked and is usually smoked afterwards specifically to make it dry soft again.

Softening and smoking

The softening is the work. A tanned or brained skin left to dry undisturbed will go stiff regardless of how well it was tanned.

• Work it continuously as it dries, over several hours: stretch it, pull it over a stake or a rope edge, rub it, flex it in every direction.
• You cannot leave it and come back. Once it dries stiff, it must be rewetted and the whole softening done again.
• This is genuinely hard physical work and it is the step people underestimate by the widest margin.

Smoking afterwards, over a cool smouldering fire of rotten punky wood, deposits compounds that let the skin dry soft after wetting. Buckskin that has not been smoked goes stiff and papery the first time it is rained on.

• Cool smoke, never flame. Sew the skin into a bag or a cone over a smoke pit and keep the fire smouldering, not burning.
• Both sides, an hour or more each, until the colour has changed through.
• Never leave it unattended. See hot and cold smoking for the fire management, which is the same problem.

Being honest about the effort

A single deer hide, bark tanned, is a season of intermittent work, a great deal of scraping and several weeks of waiting. The result is perhaps enough leather for a pair of gloves and a few straps.

That is why this page ranks rawhide first. Rawhide takes days, uses no chemicals, and produces a material that binds, repairs and lashes better than anything you can make. Most of what a household actually needs from a skin, it can get from rawhide.

Tanning is worth learning if you keep animals or have regular access to hides, and it is worth knowing about rather than attempting if you do not.