HughMungis

Advanced Tanning Solutions sells something called "Enzymol" that works a little too well. It's not listed anywhere on their website but if you email or call them they'll help you out. I let one of my bison hides soak in a barrel of it for a bit too long and I was accidentally ripping this gigantic grain leather with my bare hands. If you order some, the directions they send with shouldn't be thrown away lol.

thank you

I'm in the DC area and I've been tanning bison hides for a few months now and I've got more than I need. I'd like a coat made of one or several of the hides I have but I have neither the tools or the skills to do it myself. I'm willing to pay in either cash or a fully tanned and oiled hair-on buffalo hide or a mix of the two. Please PM me if this is a challenge you're interested in taking on.

I got to thinking about this and figured I'd ask some people with more of a technical background. I called up a few universities and here are the ones that couldn't give me an answer: University of Kansas Wyoming University South Dakota State University University of Nebraska Cornell Stanford Johns Hopkins MIT haha I literally called all of their departments of biology with this question and none of them had an answer. I'll update the list as I keep trying different states. I'm starting to think that nobody knows because nobody's actually tried different methods of doing it. I think what I'm going to do is cut this spare deer hide I have in to strips and test out different mixtures to see what happens.

So I'm about to start working my first bison hide (i've done deer in the past) to turn it in to either a really big soft blanket, or something like a robe. I've done deer in the past and breaking those hides was a real chore, so I got to thinking about whether there's a way to do this chemically. I got to reading this chemistry paper on the hide-tanning process which was really interesting but 99% of it went over my head, but it got me thinking. There are meat tenderizers in grocery stores (bromelain powder) and even some naturally occuring enzymes that break down connective tissue a bit like pineapple juice and I'm wondering if that would help any. My question is: Is there a non-harmful bath or enzyme that I can put on my hide that will help break it while I sleep so I don't have as much to break when I wake up?