Modern Trapping Series Part 26 Prepping the hide for Tanning

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Video Transcription

okay so the next step in our process of tanning this small hides because we need to salt the hide now I've already salted it right off the bat when I hung it yesterday I've let it sit about 24 hours I'm gonna bring it down here and what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna kind of scrape the salt off of it just like this not getting overly meticulous with it I'm just doing it with the edge of my knife and then I'm going to add salt again a dry layer of salt one more time this might also scrape a little any places that I might have missed might come off at the same time I see a little spot right there no leg I can cut that off just a little piece of meat that I missed when I was initially flushing to hide okay once I've got that done then I'm gonna add another layer of salt and I'm gonna work that into the height again and I'm just using regular iodized table salt for this you want to work it into the hide really good and we're gonna let it sit again in a cool place for another 24 hours the head the ears all that stuff especially if you're trying to save that part of the hide or something that you're making you really want to get it worked in there really good

and then you just want to hang it back up and come back to it okay guys so now we've had this hide hanging out for a couple days the first day we salted it down really good the next thing we came out we scraped the salt off of it we salted it again and now we're coming out here we're going to pull it off the stretch and you can see it's still a little bit pliable and that's fine I'm gonna try to get it off the stretch without tearing a hole in it because I've got it kind of tied on this one end to the stick I have to unwrap it off the hide to get that done then I can use that stretcher for another small high it's not a big deal so I'll set that aside and hang on to it okay now what I'm gonna do is again I'm gonna scrape all the salt off of this hide and I'm just going to use my knife to do that just like this and again if there's any little chunks of meat or anything on there I'm hoping that they'll scrape off or trim off just like that it's not completely critical that I get every single stitch of salt off of this right now because I'm getting ready to soak this hide anyway the little chunks like this one right here then I can trim them off I'll trim off and get rid of them okay now this dude's ready to go into a Sookie solution again of salt water I've got some water heating up and I don't want it to boil I just want it warm and I'm going to soak this in a warm salt water solution for a little while okay so we've got this whole six quart Dutch oven here I've got salt in this water and mixing it around and I don't want this water so hot that I can't touch it so as long as I can put my finger in it and it's just lukewarm it's gonna be fine and now I'm gonna soak this real good get all the air bubbles out of it so it gets completely down inside that salt water and I'm gonna soak it in this water for about an hour and then I'll pull it out and wring it out Sterne it as it soaks and I'm keeping the fire low because I don't want this water any hotter than I can put my hands in I just want it warm not hot okay once we have soaked in for an hour or two in that salt water solution and we've rinsed the hide off real good we're going to wring it out and put it back on the stretcher now during this process we could also have soaked em in some dishwashing liquid of some sort or some non lye soap just any kind of milk soap or anything like that you could have put in the water at the same time to make the skin a little more supple also makes it smell a little better at the same time and you can use Dawn dish liquid or anything like that if you want to so what I'm gonna do now is I'm just going to try to wring this hide out a little bit and get the majority of the water off of it without getting too rough with it in case it's a fragile hide and then we're going to put it back on the stretcher again and we're not going to let it dry completely but we're gonna let it get to about the consistency that it was just a minute ago when we pulled it off where it looked like there wasn't quite stiff yet like rawhide but at the same time it wasn't completely dry it was not completely wet either and then we're going to attack put the tanning solution on this hide and get this thing tanned out so we're gonna even him up on this dresser again we're going to go back to our fork stick push it as wide as we need to push it and then lash it down

we'll push that forward as far as we need to just stretch it out and then we'll just lash it down so that it's not going to move take four or five wraps around will be enough and then we can just half hitch it again we've got a quick release knot on there that'll come out very easily when we hear a take the hide off the tannin I've got a half hitch on there with a tail now we're ready to hang this height back up again and go from there you