Advice For Making Rawhide

[bucksnort]

You got me, I may have fudged it a little. With our chosen art form you always have to kill another cow.

[rgerbitz]

Been awhile since I've had a chance to get on here. Been even longer since I have had an oppurtunity to ruin a hide. I know I have thrown away more hides than I really care to admit to. Thanks to alot of people willing to suffer my ignorace I have picked up on some key peices of info. They are as follows:

- The best rawhide comes from a skinny animal

- Regardless of your method of dehairing and drying the more fat that is in/on the hide the more interference you will have to the process.

- The chemist say that liming works from the flesh side. The lime penetrates through fat slowly, which if the fat and connective tissue isn't thouroughly removed will make for uneven hair removal. Or in some of my cases, a hide that was useless in some areas with hair firmly attached in others.

- If using hides from feeder steers/heifers it is best to flesh as soon as possible. The more body heat in the hide the better. If using a old cow, not to big of deal.

- If drying a hide to scrap the hair once dried the more even you can get the hide prior to complete dry down the better. Fleshing is important, some will take a sander to the hide

before completely dry to thin down some of the thicker areas to get a more even drying process. You will find if to much fat. or if the hide is thicker, that if not dryed evenly the hide will

dry with wrinkles in it making it very difficult to remove the hair without damaging the top grain of the hide. Winter hair on animals can be an issue if not clipped of prior to drying.

- Sodium Sulfide will slip hair very effectively. It is a mess. It smells horrible. Your wife may make you sleep in the barn for a night or two till the smell wears off of you. But, In 30

minutes to an hour you can have a hide that is as slick as a babies back side. (Thank you Rod and Denise)

- Red haired animals make the prettiest rawhide. Doesn't matter which method used. The farther away from black you can get the better looking the rawhide.

- Chiggers suck. Nothing worse than spending a bunch of time fleshing, stirring, slipping (sleeping in the barn) streching a hide to find that bugs and barb wire have had their way with

the best parts of your hide.

- If dry scraping a hide a solid peice of iron with 4 perfectly square and sharp edges can mean the difference between being able to get out of bed the next day on your own or needing a

crane to lift you out. Lay it over a barrel or post and sit on it. You can do it in the frame standing up but I'd rather sit and work whenever possible.

- The first lesson to learn in making rawhide is how to get and maintain a sharp edge on any tool you will be using. That tution is best paid with books and videos, not scars and stiches.

- The second lesson is temper. If it not tempered right don't work with it. To hard and blades will bend and break. To wet the hide will strech and look like crap once braided. Just right

the heavens will open and Dorrance himself will sit by your side and tell you stories of days gone by as you effortlessly cut the perfect strands. Perfect temper takes feel, the only way

to learn feel is to find out what feels bad and what feels good. If you are just getting started and have no one near by to learn from to feel what perfect is you are going to be throwing

away some hide. It's OK there are thousands of feet of rawhide being born everyday.

- Maintaining temper while working. Feel will tell you when you need to add water or let dry out a bit. You can't braid for 2 hours straight and not have a plan on how to maintain the

perfect temper. Spray bottles, plastic bags, soaps, potions, barrels, damp towels, humidors every one has its place depending on the current humidity of the day.

There are many more tips that can be added to this list and hopefully many of you will do so. If not for the advise I gleaned from those willing to share I would have given up on braiding altogether. I am a long way from being inducted into the TCAA, but some day I may get the perfect hide, not ruin it, have my tution payed in full, and be able to bring to bear the knowledge and skill of those willing to share and create something worthy of recognition by my peers.

Best of luck,

Rob

[curlyjo]

Excellent tutorial, rgerbitz. The only thing I can add that might help is to measure and write down everything you try in the entire process of from green hide to length of string for braiding. It's a lot easier to have a reference than try to remember what you did last time. And make your strings a little long. When you cut them off, take them outside and throw in the garbage away from your work area. It's a lot easier to cut a little off than splice! Nothing more fun then an 8 strand nosebutton 1 1/2" to short. Write it down. Even if it didn't work. Brad

[rcsaddles]

Very nice, Rob. When I have a few minutes or a half hour, I will post how I do the rawhide from start to finish just as a comparision and as more info.

Sorry for the arguement, Buck. We have to make our own fun here in Montana. You just opened the door for me.

[rcsaddles]

My rawhide teacher was Mary Fields from Bonanza, Oregon. I will explain the way she taught me, and how I do things. It is open for discussion and I wll say now, take whatever advise and ideas you can get and adjust them to work for you.

I guess I should say that when I skin a cow, I will skin from the top of the shoulder, down to the belly line on each side and up in front of the tailhead. Kind of a big circle.

If I take the hide off the critter, I will lay it out on the ground with the hair side down. I will give it an hour or two or whatever it takes to start getting some firmness to it. I then use a utility knife and start in the middle of the hide and cut a strap about 1 1/4 inch wide. I just kind of corkscrew out. Of course you need to be on the lookout for a brand or two or three, as well as any other blemishes that will affect the quality and intergity of the rawhide. If the hide is already dry, I will soak it and tehn start cutting my strap. The reason for the utility knife is that I can change the blade often.

Once the strap is cut, I will tie one end to a post and stretch it as far as I can and tie to another post. I will then tie a rope in the middle of the strap, which can be as long as 140 feet, and pull it over to one side and tie it to something solid. This is to take more stretch out of the rawhide. I then use my pocket knife to scrape the hair off the hide. this can take up to four or five hours of scraping. If the strap is too wide, as it dries, it will curl and be a bugger to scrape.

Once the hair is all scraped off, I can either store the strap or soak it and split it. If splitting, I put that strap in a barrel of water for a day or so until it is the consistency of spaghetti. I will then run it through my splitter taking a paper thin slice at a time. I might have to pull it through the splitter up to 10 or 12 times. Don't try and hurry this process. If you get carried away and think you are doing great and can go faster, that is when the strap will curl and you will cut through it. That, is experience speaking.

After splitting, I usually hang the strap up so that it is not touching itself. Usually in the shade or out of sunlight to start the tempering process. I usually hang it over an old clothes drying rack, running ut back and forth across it. As the strap starts to dry, the edges will become hard and the middle will still be flexible. When it gets like this, I put the strap in a plastic bag for a couple of hours to "mellow" or temper and it will all come back to an even moisture content. Usually at this point, the hide is ready to cut string. As Rob mentioned, when it is ready and cutting great, there is nothing better than just cutting that string.

This may sound strange but... when I start to cut my string, I take a ver narrow string off first to make a good straight edge. I will be taking this off of the "inside" cut of the strap. Yes, you can tell which is the inside fo the cut and wwhich is the outside. I always cut from teh inside to the outside.

Remember, this is the way I was taught and the way I make my rawhide. I am not saying it is the only way or the best way to make rawhide.

When I first met Mary, she was in her 70's. I told her I was looking for a young lady that could teach me everything I needed to know about rawhide. She laughed and said she cuold teach me all the mistakes. I often asked "why" on the techniques she used. She always told me she had tried different ways and this was the way she found that worked the best but I could try it another way. If you don't know, Mary Fields is in teh Bruce Grant Encyclopedia of Leather and Rawhide Braiding. She passed away the summer of 2013. I believe she was in her 90's. She and I bacame pretty good friends and she even signed by Bruce Grant book for me.

[bucksnort]

Great job guys. There's a lot of knowledge packed into a small space. Joe, I definitely set myself up for that one. Rob, could you expand on the Sodium Sulfide when you get a chance? Thanks, Buck

[millwright]

Yeah, Buck, lots of good information. I was wondering if I use dry ash and scrape the hair, will it hurt the hair if I leave some unscraped and clip it? I'm not sure if the ash will bother the clipped hair. I read somewhere that some people leave the short clipped hair on the strings and braid with it. I might leave a shoulder or something clipped to try and see how this looks. I would like to hear more about the sodium sulfide too.

Thanks for the detailed description Rob and Joe. Rob what size steel square piece do you use to scrape the hair off using the dry scrape method? I thought I might try to scrape with it using the dry ash method too.

Joe when do you let the hide dry/cure to become rawhide? When it's pulled and stretched? You take the hair off first or let it dry then scrape the hair off. How much faster do you figure the hide dries/cures being cut in the strip rather than left whole? Thanks, Bret.

[bucksnort]

Bret, The ash won't harm the hair you want to keep on. I would clip the areas you want to save before putting the ash on. The ash will get in the hair & be hard on clipper blades. I've always thought that if I was making a piece of equipment for myself with a hide I had clipped short that I probably wouldn't bother scraping it. The hair will wear off though, so it's not a permanent look. Buck

[oltoot]

Just throwing some more stuff in the pot. When rawhide reatas were more common, it was thought to be preferable to get the reata braided with the moisture from the critter still in the hide and to add little or no more. To accomplish this meant stretching the hide in the shade, fleshing vigorously, sometimes clipping the hair if it was especially wooly, stripping wide sogas, stretching them and then letting them get nearly dry, then first shaving the remaining flesh, then the hair, then cutting the final strings then braiding. No long breaks to go to the fair with that method. I used a modified approach for using gear for awhile. I would stretch, flesh, cut ~2" strips then stretch and dry them. Come time to make something I would scrape a string, wet and temper it then cut my strings to use from that, splitting where necessarry. Those little puppies were sure enough stout and sported a bit of a "punchy" look where a little red or black fuzz remained in a spot or two.

[curlyjo]

I heard this from Lige Langston from Surprise Valley area of Ca. When he first started making strings, he would cut wide string and stretch out and dry. Then he would put some old bottles in a sack and break into pieces, reach in with gloves on and get a piece and scrape the hair with the broken glass. When it dulled up he'd just grab another piece of broken glass and go on scraping. Always had a sharp tool. And if you end up with a little bit of hair on a finished string, just rub with sandpaper and buff it off. Brad