Tanning a rabbit pelt

[RJSchaefer]

This has been an all-day process.

I want to tan without chemicals. I also want it to be soft. Oh, and we discarded the brains.

After hours of reading last night and this morning, I still couldn't find two guides that agreed with each other. Everyone has their "own" way of doing this, it seems. I went with mayo after salting. I had it on hand.

Pelt still isn't dry. I've worked it and worked it, peeled and scraped and gaaaaaaah. Hopefully this will at least give me a starting point for the future. Tips are appreciated now!!

 

[oesdog]

Try this link hope it is helpful
I know he was doing tanning naturally.



http://www.rivercottage.net/forum/ask/processing-and-other-crafts/0tanning-rabbit-skins/

Here is another link to help with the rest of the bunny.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2007/oct/20/recipes.foodanddrink

Oes - good luck let me know how it goes as I want to try to do this in time too!

 

[RJSchaefer]

Thanks. The first link uses alum. Natural, I'm sure, but not something I had readily available.

I started with the idea of soft leather and moved backward. Rawhide is just skin-jerky. Leather is supple rawhide. You have to oil it to maintain suppleness and collagen, but still keep it "dehydrated". So now I've got my pelt mostly dehydrated, and I'm going to work it and smooth in some fat (probably lard).

The one thing all the battery acid free recipes have in common is eventual smoking. I'm not sure when to do that.

 

[settingdusk]

You can buy canned brains and still get a good white tan.

 

[RJSchaefer]

You can buy canned brains and still get a good white tan.

canned brains?!

 

[settingdusk]

The example on the left can be acquired at local butchers usually. The one on the right is available in stores but I am unsure if the gravy would mess up the tan. This site has the same basic method I have used with good pictures, http://www.wildernessskillsinstitute.com/brainTanning.htm

 

[settingdusk]

Pic didn't show

 

[jungletoy]

This has been an all-day process.

I want to tan without chemicals. I also want it to be soft. Oh, and we discarded the brains.

After hours of reading last night and this morning, I still couldn't find two guides that agreed with each other. Everyone has their "own" way of doing this, it seems. I went with mayo after salting. I had it on hand.

Pelt still isn't dry. I've worked it and worked it, peeled and scraped and gaaaaaaah. Hopefully this will at least give me a starting point for the future. Tips are appreciated now!!

When I was a teenager I lived next door to a couple (Husband taught at the AF survival school, and she worked with an American Indian outreach program) who were OSSG (original self-suffeicency gurus). We would always give them our deer, elk, or rabbit pelts and the bladers of larger animals if they were full . She tanned them to varying degrees from stiff to a very supple, almost Ugg style depending on application. She made traditional indian wear using only traditional tools and materials. I seem to remember (as I helped her on many occasions) we used two de-barked sugar pine boughs (for twisting the solution out of the processing pelts) a small cook fire with a tripod (pine boughs) over it and small wood canoes filled with urine and or epsom salts and stretchers. Her one technological compromise was a Bowie knife rather than her flint or bone scrapers and knifes. If my thirty-five year memory is correct, it seems we did this four pelt process of poke, soak, twist, smoke, rinse and repeat, over the course of an hour. Somewhere in there was the scraping part which she did frequently. Not sure or can't remember if they were soaked for a day in epsom solution or urine or both. She may have used some sort of processed animal fat. I was just there for child slave labor part. I don't recall any of the solutions requiring gloves or eye protection or being particularly obnoxious but then again, at that time they also thought cigarettes and asbestos were safe.

Totally useless information I know, but a lot of the American Indian methods are passed down by word of mouth and therefore must be transcribed to be digitized. Unfortunately, some of these skills were lost in translation, antiquity or the tomes they were printed in have yet to be digitized (see also greek fire). Failing that, the Romans were most notable for refining ways to manipulate and combine lipids and phospho-lipids (oil and water) for making lye and processing leather, soaps etc. The later will most likely be well documented. Another possibility is changing your search venacular. In our new 15 second trend world where context and even the words used to discuss a topic are provided by the media. The effect would be similar to differences in searches on "skinning" versus "dressing". Dressing sounds more couture where skinning or skinnin' seems more countrified. To break the confines of the geographic search bias, substitute an s for a z like recognise rather than recognize. Keep your search engine language preference to english but use french (the second international language for contracts) or even latin. The Google algorithym uses their legitimate search power for about 3-5 useful 'hits' then a couple of pages of SEO jockeys who pay to have their results manipulated. Page 8 or so is where you find the the 256 bit hard to view webpage from 1994 with all the details you need. Regrettably, the time consuming thing is in the working of the leather expidited only by harsher chemicals or mechanical process. Hope this helps or at least jumpstarts the brainpan.

 

[archerobx]

Last year I dried mine in salt and borax . When all moisture was out and they done, I washed in a salt water solution to get the salt chunks off. Then I hung up to dry then used a leather polish I got from TSC and just worked the leather till it was soft .
I gave it to a friend and it is hung up and he hasn't said anything bad

 

[Umlaut]

This has been an all-day process.

I want to tan without chemicals. I also want it to be soft. Oh, and we discarded the brains.

After hours of reading last night and this morning, I still couldn't find two guides that agreed with each other. Everyone has their "own" way of doing this, it seems. I went with mayo after salting. I had it on hand.

Pelt still isn't dry. I've worked it and worked it, peeled and scraped and gaaaaaaah. Hopefully this will at least give me a starting point for the future. Tips are appreciated now!!

That's awesome that you're trying to tan w/o chemicals. I've read that they're very harmful.
I think the solution would be to not kill the rabbit in the first place.