Apprentice tips on braintanning buckskin, or, learn from my mistakes
I think this probably isn't high-level enough to go in Tutorials, but if anyone thinks it should be moved, sure.
I have a belief that it's sometimes better for an apprentice to teach a newbie. Especially with physical skills. I get this belief from learning to drive stickshift from my Dad, who just kept yelling, "Pull the clutch out smoothly. SMOOTHLY!" The fact is, when you've been doing a thing for so many years it's second nature, you don't notice the details of what you're doing and you don't put them into words. But if you've only just learned, you have to think about every detail and you can communicate it. I just completed my third braintanned deer hide (my second if you don't count the, er, bad one), so I'm not ready to do a tutorial yet, but I'm able to offer a nice little list of things NOT to do and a few tips. So, this is the list of things I learned on my own rather than from tutorials, because tutorials don't always think to mention "don't do this utterly stupid thing" or "here's what happens when you rub a Walmart bag on your hide." Maybe it can help someone (you could read it along with a real tutorial), and maybe it can have some entertainment value. Feel free to laugh, I've done a few pretty laughable things.
I'll do this in order of the process:
- It's possible to de-hair a hide by putting it in a creek. I experimented, left a fleshed hide in a clear shallow creek in late November for two weeks and when I came and got it (assuming it would be complete crap, actually) the hair came off nicely and the hide was fine. But the grain wasn't swelled, which is what you need for scraping, so this is only useful for making rawhide or if you want the hair off so you can save the hide for later. (It's a lot smaller in the freezer that way.)
- BE CAREFUL WITH LYE! Holy crap, I'm an idiot, I made a lye solution for the soaking ("bucking") stage and I put my hands in it without gloves once or twice and it was OK, just stung a little on my cuts, so I got careless. I was messing around in there shifting the bricks that were holding my hide down and I must have come into contact with a little undissolved lye, or an area of higher concentration. Barely noticed the stinging was getting worse at first, then went OW and rinsed my hands off and then kept rinsing and rinsing, poured vinegar on it like the lye bottle said to do, there were two spots on my fingers where it had started eating away at my flesh. Literally the top couple layers of the skin were gone and the flesh exposed, and this slippery clear liquid was oozing out. I think it was saponifying my fat. Literally making it into soap, just like when Grandma made lye soap in a big kettle. Just in two small spots, but AAAGH! Took a couple weeks to fully heal and scared the hell out of me. I still have the marks.
- Using wood ash gets your hide dirty, but it may not matter all that much. A lot of wood ash has charcoal bits in it, especially if it's from a woodstove. You can sift them out, but in my experience it's not perfect (even with a fine sifter) and you'll still end up with a gray rather than white hide after stretching. I noticed the pros didn't seem too concerned about this... and then realized that when the hide's been colored by smoking, you can't really tell the difference. I dunno, it may make a small difference, but my ex-gray hides look fine.
- It's better to flesh right away but if you can't, a wood ash or lye bucking solution will keep the flesh from rotting. Sometimes the pros don't mention that, because they have their routine down and always flesh right away.
- Don't take it out of the bucking solution and try to grain until the hair is coming out so easily you don't even have to pull. This wasn't my own learning, a guy at PaleoPlanet forums told me, but it helped me a lot and I hadn't gotten that from the tutorials so I include it. If you soak it long enough, graining's so much easier.
- Ever wonder what'll happen if you skip the graining process? I can tell you! I'd soaked a hide in a bucking solution that was too weak and hadn't swelled the grain up enough, so scraping the grain was just the toughest thing in the world. I kinda bodged it up, got maybe half of it off. I brained it, started stretching it. The parts where I'd gotten more than half the grain off just had splotches of grain, discolorations--but the parts where I'd gotten less than half of it off were completely stiff. The grain, as it dried, became this stiff, hard, translucent layer over top of the buckskin that prevented the buckskin from stretching when I stretched it--so the buckskin became stiff too. Unusable. That was the "bad" hide. Maybe a quarter of it is OK, the rest is crap. Chalk it up to experience.
- Guess what printed plastic grocery bags and lye can do to your hide? This is how great discoveries are made, except my discovery is "how to make a crappy blue blotch on your hide." Seriously. I was graining a hide soaked in lye, and I didn't have one of those spiffy rubber aprons, so I grabbed a random plastic bag to put between me and the gross hide. It was a Walmart bag with blue printing on it. The printing rubbed right onto the lye-soaked hide in a big blue blotch that's still there to this day, somehow chemically fixed on the smoked hide. Lucky for me it was the bad hide again.
Think I'll split the post here so it's not too long.
