Thread: Tanning, what do I do?

For a deer, as long as it's clean, cool and dry it should be ok. Sounds like you've scraped it well, so that's good - fat and meat will cause spoiling over time even if it is salted, and scraping is needed to remove membrane anyways. Unless you scraped so far that you're hitting the bottoms of the hair follicles and having the hair fall out in those areas on the other side, you're ok with how much you've scraped.

Deer aren't particularly oily, so no issues with oil in the skin going rancid and causing spoiling that way (happens in fatty animals like raccoons, bears etc), but fat on the flesh side of the skin can cause the same thing. Fat burn shows as the skin turning a very dark yellow or green tinged then black (not to be confused with the skin drying to a rawhide translucent yellow, that's a good thing). If the skin is heavily salted make sure it's got a lot of airflow around it - the salt will pull moisture in damp climates... can lead to the skin being damp, swelling, and small areas of salt migration allowing some slow acting bacteria to move in and slip the skin. Basically your goal right now is to make a clean rawhide - when it gets tanned you complete the process for turning it into a converted leather product, but as long as it's kept cool, dry, and neutral ph a rawhide will last a long time.

Edit - other things to look out for are animals and bugs. It's now a tasty chew toy for dogs, rodents etc, the salt just adds to the flavor. Birds sometimes steal fur or poo on hides left in rafters, leading to staining and rot. Bugs, especially dermestid/carrion beetles will eat the hide, so heavy salting reduces the chances of that, as well as spraying with a bug spray on the hair and flesh sides (some bug sprays are in turn lethal to your pets if they lick the hide when you aren't around).

@berg243 any reason for the difference in citric vs boric acid? Is that a powder mix, wet mix etc? Any idea of PH you're going for with the acids?

Originally Posted by berg243

it comes dry premixed in 1200kg bags . citric makes the lambskins /wool a yellow tinge but doesnt seem to colour the deer skins . you can barely see the yellow citric acid granules in the salt normally but some bags are very yellow. with the deer skins they are tumbled in a mixer for about an hour and a half with the first lot of salt then removed from mixer and the mixer is drained to get rid of as much moisture then are put back in and a second smaller lot of salt is added and then tumbled for about half an hour .can still have a lot of juice on them but they are fine to pack onto a pallet then strapped and have a couple shrink wrap bags put over the top and sides which dont seal the bottom then they are stored outside till sold.will see if i can find out the mix ratio for the salt and citric acid as it might be handy for anyone wanting to preserve deer skins .

Very interesting. Lots of good info there!

Are these skins are being made into leather rather than hair-on? Or both?
I would have thought wrapping and storing outside would make the hair more likely to slip, but that it would be ok for the skin itself, but with your saying that it colours the wool that suggests they're doing hair-on as well.


Sorry for the thread derail Chelsea!

Loads of good information here but a pro tip is to use a 3000psi water blaster with an oscillating head (tip) to get all the meat and crap off the skin. Makes light work of what once was a hard job. YouTube hunt shack tanning, step by step how to which I followed and got great results. Excuse the holes in the photos, my skinning needs work.

A little update. So we had salted the shit out the skin and got it to the point it was hard as cardboard. Cleaned it up before hand probably took it too far back in places and trimmed up the edges where we couldn’t clean it back enough. I hung it on the clothes horse until we can get some leder tanning stuff after lockdown and our house is so damp and cold and it’s been foggy for 3 days and it’s started to get soft and a little damp.
Should I salt it again? And again and again? I can’t have it in the sun because it’s so foggy.

Next time just salt the fur and throw it in the freezer as soon as, then once you have the tanning gear follow these gals recipe...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QZrCf_7eGN4

I shot a couple fallow last year and tanned them myself ( never done it before ) I follow the huntshack team on Instagram and they had this video up. Super easy to do and they turned out pretty bloody awesome considering I had no idea what I was doing. Real soft and subtle, no hair slip. Even an old boy who used to tan a lot in his day said they are bloody awesome.