Advice For Making Rawhide

[bucksnort]

Hide looks good, keep us posted. Buck

[curlyjo]

Looks good to me. You just need practice so send that one my way and try again while it's still fresh on your mind!

[millwright]

Oh curlyjo, money can't touch that hide . It was quite an ordeal, but I'm proud to have it done. I dry ashed a calf last week that turned out like rawhide. I stretched/fleshed a nice little herford hide today and scraped a horse that I had. It turned out nice but I won't be scraping a horse again. It was way too much like work.

I have two calf hides, I'm going to lime one and dry ash the other. I have circles cut and cased from the hide in the pics and I'll finally get to cut some strings tomorrow, I hope. I also hope to have some gear made before too long to show as well. I appreciate the help/input/advice. Bret

[rcsaddles]

I did the lime method on a horse hide over Christmas and I am thinking that is the way to go on horse. I cut the hide into pieces such as both hips, both sides and then I used the 6 inch wide strip down the back as a piece. I put them in a barrel with lime water. It froze around the outside so I put a tarp over it and a little electric heater going. I had this in a shop with no insulation and no heat. I stirred it about 4 to 6 times a day. I noticesd that after about day 8 the hair was starting to slip. I did not have time during the week to do anything with it so on day 10, I got teh hide out to remove the hair. I was wondering how I was going to do it so I threw the first piece out on the ground. We had snow at the time. and used a garden hoe to scrape the hair. Let me tell you, when you think the hair is just starting to slip, wait another day or two if you can. It took all of about 15 minutes to remove the hair from all five pieces.

I then put the pieces back in teh barrel, after dumping the lime out, and used it to rinse them. I must have put clean water in and stirred it about 20 times until the water was clear. Then I put them in a bucket with about three gallons of water and a cup of white vinegar. I left it in that for about 12 hours and then used water and baking soda to neutralize everything.

I then stretched the pieces on a piece of plywood and let them dry. More after I cut some string.