Saturday, March 14, 2009

The Deer Skin Experiment

  1. Get deer hide from dad out of the trashcan and put it in a black plastic trash bag.
  2. Convince the wife to let me take it home in the car.
  3. Buy salt.
  4. Take it home and lay it out on a piece of plywood.
  5. Cut the head off (yes, its just as gross as it sounds). This took a little work. The neon green carpenter's knife I had wasn't doing much until i flipped the blade to a fresh edge. Then I cut right thru the rest of the hide. I considered grabbing the hack saw to take the skull cap off and save the brains for tanning, but decided some things were just a no-no and put the head back in the bag, into the trash can. The garbage men won't even know.
  6. Salt the hide.
  7. Leave it out to cure.
  8. Chase the bees off and salt some more.
  9. Roll it up and stick it in the shed during the cold of winter.
And that's as far as I've gotten. Its starting to warm up, so I have to decide soon what I'm doing with it. It is not going to be thick enough for armor, but it would make for nice trimming around the edges. I still have some scraping to do, and decide if i want to de-hair it, but that would spoil the trimming part. Soon...

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