Denise

Well, I guess it is OK. It was coming from the tower but I pulled it out from under the desk to hear better if it was coming from the back or the DVD drive at the front and it quit. ????? If it starts up again, I'll ask again. Jack, you make a great computer technician - fixing it from miles away with just a question!!

This evening my computer has just started making a tapping kind of noise as I work and especially as I change documents or sites. Everything else seems normal. Is this OK, bad, BAD, or REAL BAD??? Anything I should check to see why it is doing it?

No affect on it at all. We (and other tree makers) freeze a lot of our rawhide till we are ready to use it. We will freeze fresh hides too until Rod is ready to make rawhide. You don't want to be bending it around a bunch when it is frozen, but once it thaws out, it is good to go. We thaw ours in water, changed twice a day, till it is thawed. That keeps it fresh while the rest is thawing out.

Justin, You better be careful. She may decide she doesn't want to support your saddle making and instead wants your saddle making to support her. You may want to talk to Rod about that... Denise

We make our own rawhide to cover saddle trees with, and from experience, we know that age, sex and breed all play a part in what a hide is like. Hides from younger animals (yearling bulls for example), even if they are as big, aren't as thick or as firm as from older animals. Cows have thinner belies than bulls do even if the hide over the backbone is as thick. When we get a Hereford hide, it is always thicker than a similar size of other breeds. We have used the occasional dairy hide from local people who slaughter a steer for their own consumption. Definitely thinner than a beef hide of similar age and size. But I knew that from another experience. When I was working as a vet, we had a really large Holstein heifer come in with calving problems. I ended up doing a C-section to get the calf - my one and only on a dairy cow. When I started the incision I used the same amount of pressure I'd been using to cut the skin on all the beef cows I'd done surgery on that spring. Went through the skin, all four layers of muscle, the peritoneum and fortunately not quite all the way through the rumen wall. Yup, they've got thinner hides all right!! I reajusted the amount of pressure for the rest of the incision. Got a live calf and the heifer went on to do well in their milking string too!

JC Javelle, Absolutely no offense intended, but your comments are a perfect example of how much misinformation is getting to the public from people with strong agendas and how far away most people in North America are from the "living, breathing, bleeding animal side" of food production. And we as leatherworkers need to do our own educating of customers about the realities of where the leather came from and that it IS NOT the result of abuse of animals. For example, you said " I don't know if the hides from cows raised specifically for meat consumption are used in the leather industry or not." Yes. The truth is that pretty much ALL cattle are raised primarily for meat. Even old show cattle and rodeo animals end up there eventually. They don't call them "bologna bulls" for nothing! And this is where all the hides come from, except for these ones offered by Mr. Seigel. No cattle are raised primarily for hides. They aren't worth that much! Leather is a by-product of the meat industry, plain and simple. "Corn is believed to cause ulcers in cows so large that they will punch holes in the sides of the animal. You can reach your hand, from outside of the cow, to inside one of the cows affected stomachs." This is plain and simply not true. If you can do that, the animal is dead (unless it has had surgery to put that hole there permanently.) Fact - grain overload (any kind) can kill animals, but it is an acute condition where a bovine gets into large quantities of grain when their ruman flora (the bugs in the stomach that start the digestion process) are not used to them. They don't ulcerate and rupture. It affects their body's acid/base balance and electrolytes and they get wobbly, go down, can't get up, go to sleep and die. One of the more peaceful ways to go actually. (No, I'm not kidding. I've seen and treated it as a vet.) This is why cattle feeders take such care when they start increasing the grain in the ration to do it slowly, letting the rumen flora change to the type needed to digest that volume of grain. Cattle also die from eating alfalfa (a common grass and hay) when they are not used to it. These ones do bloat, which causes their death, but they don't rupture either. Cattle are put on high grain diets at the end of their life to gain fat more quickly and efficiently. Cattle can fatten on grass, but it has to be really good quality grass, lots of it, in a breed that fattens easily. It is a lot more expensive and difficult to finish cattle on grass than on grain, and that is probably the major reason for feeding grain. It comes down to economics. We don't have the land base or climate in North America to fatten the number of animals on grass that we eat, nor are most consumers willing to spend the extra money that fattening cattle in this way requires. Grass fed cattle in North America are a niche market for the people who will spend the extra dollars and from the producers willing to take the risk and put the effort into private marketing. As far as the beef industry goes, fast food outlets don't have as much say as they may have on something like poultry production. Like Bruce said, McDonalds buys hamburger. McDonalds has had an influence on the way the slaughter houses do their work, but it doesn't extend down the line to the beef producers. Cattlemen are working to produce steak, not hamburger. That is where the money is - top graded young animals with a fair amount of fat. Restaurant steaks are a huge market in North America, and it is the restaurant trade more than anything else that dictates the type of cuts available in your local grocery store. You end up with a lot of hamburger even from the top end animals, let alone the cull cows and bulls (old breeding stock and milk cows whose days are over) so no one grows and feeds animals for that market. While there are only a few major companies who own a lot of the meat packing plants, there are still lots of smaller packing plants out there servicing their local communities. And even the major companies do not (yet) own or feed all (or even the majority, I would think) of the cattle they slaughter. Beef production is still, at its roots, started on the privately owned ranch or farm. It isn't till the cattle are ready to hit the feedlot that large companies get really interested in them, and there are still lots of smaller, privately owned and family owned feedlots in North America too. The family farm is still very much a part of animal production, especially in the beef industry compared to other meats. Groups with agendas and big budgets try to portray it all as "big business" trying to rule the world, and it just isn't true - but they get the press. Family farm owners are too busy taking care of their animals to put out press releases and make videos. I'm not saying that big business isn't involved, but not to the extent and not in the way a lot of the "documentaries" portray it. JC, I wrote this with the intention of clearing up some misconceptions and helping you learn more about the beef industry and where our leather comes from. We don't ranch full time, but we do run a few feeder cattle on our grass in the summer and a lot of our friends are ranchers. Making a living with cattle is getting tougher all the time. The inputs are higher and the profits are less. The last thing our industry needs is lots of false information being strewn all over the internet and the media, but that is just what is happening more and more. Writing this post is my attempt to get some of the "actual facts" out there. I hope it helps.

Here is an older thread with some good discussion on this topic. http://leatherworker.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=9992&st=0&p=13328&hl=sheepskin&fromsearch=1entry13328

I don't know what he did when he braided with it. That was long before my time. We don't braid with it now either. Rod makes the rawhide and stretches it on a frame to dry, so it has some stretch out of it that way. We cut our lace after casing and let it dry again, but to use it to sew the rawhide on trees, he throws it in a bucket of water and gets it soaking wet again - a lot different than braiders do. But when he starts to use it he will manually stretch it and it will stretch 1/2 to 1/3rd longer than it was before it was rewetted. Then when he stitches with it an pulls it down, it gets even thinner. Comparing deerhide laced trees to trees laced with calf hide, the calf hide is thicker and doesn't pull down as tightly, which in my mind says it isn't as stretchy. If you were going to braid something with a stretchier hide, what would you do to get the stretch out?

WOW!!

Butcher - here is a link that tell you how to get the pictures on this forum. It's pretty easy. If I can do it, anyone can!! http://leatherworker.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=15122

Gawdzilla, If you do get answers from the tannery on this question, please post them here. It would be great to have the information "from the horse's mouth", so to speak, posted here for all to read.

miguelm Thank you for your response as well. Sharing knowledge like this is what Leatherworker is all about!

Calvin, believe me, it stretches!! We use it all the time to lace trees together. Very strong, but VERY stretchy. Rod stretches the hide to dry it, then we case it and make string. But when he soaks it (soaking wet) to use as lace it will get about 1/3rd or so longer again when you pull on it, and of course it gets substantially narrower too. Rod has also braided with deer rawhide back in his younger days before he knew better. Not good results. He says maybe if you could get all the stretch out of it before you cut the lace it may work. For a master like Ortega, he could probably braid anything and make it look good. I'm not saying don't try it because it is amazing what results people can come up with when they don't know a thing can't be done. But you do need to figure out what to do about the stretch factor because it is substantial in comparison with cow and calf hide.

Thanks, Brian. I sure appreciate your response.

Slow down, everyone - no running with scissors on Leatherworker! I'm not a braider so the technical parts of this thread are completely over my head, but I think everyone missed some basic ground rules somewhere along the line. LW is here for people to voluntarily share their work and knowledge with others, to show the rest of the world what can be done with leather and, ultimately, to help people not need their day jobs if they don't want them. There are some incredible artists who show their work here, and while some share their techniques, others do not. Everyone is entitled to ask the questions and not be belittled for them, just as nobody is required to answer them. If people have figured out for themselves how to do something (whether or not others have figured it out in the past) and choose not to share their knowledge, that is their right. How much of this dispute is due to language differences and cultural differences is hard to tell, but it appears to have gone past that stage now. Name calling and putting others down is not tolerated here from anybody, in any language or any culture. This isn't kindergarten. Treating everyone with respect IS a requirement in this community. Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.

Welcome, Olivier. Yup, you've come to the right place! Join in. Post pictures. Enjoy the coffee, but give the doughnuts a pass. Too many bad stories about them around here...

Wow, that was fast!! 16 minutes to turn that out!! Fanatastic!! Great idea guys! Looking forward to seeing what everyone makes!

I kind of like it right off the bat.

Sure it is! It lets us see your stuff!

Glad you got it figured out!! Looking forward to more pictures now!

Patricia, you don't need to use photobucket to get pictures up on the forum. Here are some directions to help you out. Having been on dial up until lately, I understand what you are dealing with, and this works great so long as you make your pictures smaller before you upload them. http://leatherworker.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=15122

Buckaroo93, Glad to have you here, especially since I can now point out to those who think I live at the North Pole (I'm in the Valleyview area) that here is someone who is 5 hours farther north of me who is still in Alberta (not even to the North West Territories yet!) and there is still ranching and farming up there. Post some pictures of your work and welcome to the forum!

People who hold strong convictions about something are often very motivated to put their money where their mouth is and will pay extra for products that fit into those convictions. You can see this with organic food, a large proportion of which is purchased by more affluent moms with small children. Working with leather of this kind would be a niche market for sure, but one that could be very profitable for those motivated to get into it. Those of us who live a more rural lifestyle don't have access to that market since our community/culture is anything but vegan, but for those working in the larger centers that are more likely to have friends/family/connections to the vegan world, and I can see a small niche market for this leather. But figuring out what to make and how to sell it would be a big job.

I see they have the information booklet for the Wickenburg show up the the LC&S website. Looks like there are a few new classes, including a couple taught by our own Hidepounder - one on finishing edges and one on Basic Floral Design. They say there is limited room for the floral design course so if you are interested, you probably want to sign up early. I can see lots of interest in these ones! Link to the booklet: http://www.leathercraftersjournal.com/files/WA11_Booklet_11-22-10.pdf Link to the Wickenburg show page: http://www.leathercraftersjournal.com/Southwest_Leatherworkers_Trade_Show.html

Welcome to LW.net Kyle. Glad for the introduction.