kerr73

I skined a deer and tryed to save the skin buy removeing all the meat and fat from the deer skin that i could . And pulled it across a wood bord and covered it with salt for a week then remove the old salt and recovered the skin with new salt .....i have done this with snake'sand bird's before and worked well.i do this for about 3 weeks .anyone know if this will work with a deer ?

Kodiakhuntmaster2

That's how I've always preserved my deer hides. They'll last about forever unless they get wet. Once the hides are salted you can wait as long as you want before you tan it.

kerr73

how do u tan it leave it out in the sun ?

03a3

I'm in the process of doing the same thing. Just resalted for the 2nd time and getting ready to scrape the hide again Fri. After your done getting ALL the fat and excess crap off the hide just rub in some saddle soap two times and then rub in some baseball glove oil twice and it will be nice and soft.

Kodiakhuntmaster2

You can either buy a commercial tanning product or brain tan the hide like the native americans did. If you buy a tanning agent, then just follow the directions on the bottle. I've used "trapper's hide tanning formula" and it worked very well.

If you want to brain tan it you have to buy a tub of hog brains from the grocery store, Ingle's normally has it.

Scrape all the salt off the hide, it should be smooth when you're done. Just use a sharp knife and hold the edge at a 90 dregree angle from the hide and scrape. Then take a 5 gallon buckett half full of warm water and mush the hog brains around in it until its mixed up in the water. Then soak the hide in it for an hour or two. Next take the hide out and work it back an fourth over something, wring it out, streach it and anything else you can think of to keep the hide moving until it's dry. It takes a few hours for it to dry. Once it's dry it should be soft.

If you want to give the hide some color, set it over the smoke of a fire. Not the heat, just the smoke. That will also make the hide water resistant.

Kodiakhuntmaster2

There are many ways to tan a hide. Saddle soap I hear works good, along with neat's foot oil, egg yolks, I've even heard of using Dove soap and mayo.

Stone Cold

I am going to try to do this next year with my skins......How do you get the blood and trash off of the fur.....

Kodiakhuntmaster2

To get the blood out of the fur I always soaked the hide in water and washed it out either before I salted it or right before I tanned it. I don't think you should soak the hide before tanning if you are using the saddle soap meathod since the oils must permeate the hide and a water soaked hide would make the oils harder to work in.

Make sure you don't use iodized salt when salting, the iodine will make the hair shed off the hide.