First Buckskin

Beginnings
We were lucky enough this year to get ahold of a deer hide to work on, our first. Anna's cousin in eastern Oregon was kind enough to save the coat from the buck that he shot last fall and it has been frozen all winter. Further, this hide was a monster, big and thick. It made for quite a laborious project. Here's what it looked like.

Fleshing
First, after thawing, we had to get all of the fat and meat off. There were some pretty large chinks of meat attached so this was pretty tough. Basically we laid the hide over a "fleshing beam" made of PVC and lumber and scraped across it with a piece of metal ruler that I ground down to a blunt edge.

Bucking
The next step was to soak the hide in a weak lye solution to loosen the hair and prepare it for scraping. We made the lye by mixing about a gallon of white wood ash with a couple of gallons of water. You can also use commercial lye. We soaked the hide in this solution for about 4 days until the hair started pulling out easily.

De-hairing
Basically the hair comes right out if you have retted it properly. We opted to go at it on the fleshing beam instead of pulling the hair out by hand. There were some sticky parts but for the most part we got it all

Scraping
Then we racked it out for dry scraping and put it on the roof to dry out which only took a couple of days in the June heat. Our dry scraping tools consisted of a couple of bladed tools that we reground on a friends grinder to have a curved blade. It turned out the modified plane blade worked best over the modified paint scraper.
This part of the process was really slow and tedious and we sort of chipped away at it over several weeks.

Scraping again
After all of the time dry scraping we tried to soak the hide to begin dressing it with eggs (our emulsifier of choice). It just would not soak up the water and we realized that all of our scraping had not been enough which forced us to rethink and instead we backed up and went through a wet-scraping process. It was a whole lot faster and effective. You would have a hard time talking us into trying to dry scrape again.

"Braining"
The traditional choice for emulsifying a hide is brains (hence the term "brain-tanning") but there are actually many viable choices including tannic acid, soap & oil and, our choice, eggs. We just whipped up a dozen eggs mixed with some water and soaked the hide overnight

Stretching
This is the most laborious step of all. After thorough wringing we pushed, pulled, stretched, yanked, and otherwise manipulated the hide until it was completely dry. If we were to let up too early before it was completely dry it would stiffen up like rawhide and the only fix would be to redo the braining and stretching

Smoking
This is the final step. By forcing smoke through the hide we make the softening permanent. It also gives the leather that rich brown color. Without smoking the hide you can't let it get wet or it will stiffen up. The final product is beautiful. and now we have another hide racked out to dry so that we can get started on it later when we have time.