Tanning Hides

[purecountry]

Anyone here have experience tanning their own hides - not your kids either ;-) - and actually doing something with the leather? Burns my personal hide that we have almost no options for hides in Alberta anymore. Our hides could fetch a premium, being natural, organic, blah, blah, blah, but we don't even get them back, let alone get paid for them.

I'd like to look into tanning them myself, even some of them, and developing a market. Any experiences to be shared?

Thanks in advance,
PC

 

[Jogeephus]

I have a friend who is a taxidermist and in a sense he tans the cape for the mount. He bought a fleshing machine that keeps him from having to manually scrape the hides. Might want to check with a taxidermist to see how they do it.

Only experience I have is with snake hides. We rub these down with glycerin instead of salt. Glycerin makes the hide subtle and soft where salt just makes a mess.

 

[denoginnizer]

Have yawl seen what they are getting for tanned tiger stripe hides? Seems like I saw some for sale in a magazine the other day for 350 bucks.

 

[Jogeephus]

That was reasonable. I've seen them as high as $800.

 

[ga. prime]

Have anybody ever heard of soaking a hide in antifreeze? Somebody told me that's how they do snake skins.

 

[dun]

A snake skin is a whoie different ballgame. You can tan small animal hides in battery acid too and it works great. Tanning large thick hides is a stinky messy time consuming labor intensive undertaking. Did it when I was younger then quit, too much work.

 

[CKC1586]

At the NAILE they had cow hides done up as rugs and went from $500 to $Oh Good Lord!!!! Beautiful tho!