How to cure leather

S

Student762

Joined
Mar 7, 2014
Messages
937
Hi guys. I have never made a sheath before:o. However I have bunch of knives that have no pants and it makes me a little sad. I want to try to make a heath but I don't have any leather. I live on a working farm and part of my duties are butchering sheep for the table so I have access to a potential goldmine of leather:D. Does anyone know how to cure the skins into leather? Thanks in advance for your replies. :D
 
Google and the City Library are your best resources right off.

Sheep, goats, and deer all have relatively thin skin compared to cows though. But! I'd love to see what happens! Good luck!

When I looked up deer tanning a while back it was a little overwhelming, lots of steps and lots of ways to mess things up.
 
Most leather suppliers sell a tanning kit, I know Tandy does. Check into that. My partner on the ranch wanted to build a reata. A reata is a rope made out of braided rawhide. There is a renaissance in using them here in parts of CA and other areas of the Pacific Slope. Good ones run about $7.50- $8.00 a foot and no self respecting reata guy would dare show at a branding with less than 60-65 feet. More is better, if you can handle it, and I've seen em to 110 ft. Mine is 75 ft and they are temperamental and finicky, requiring very gentle and artistic handling in use as they are not very strong or durable. Roping with one is just like roping with a poly rope but completely different. However, I digress, sorry, reata roping can get under your skin. My buddy had a cowhide from one he'd butchered. The work getting the hide to the rawhide stage was so overwhelming and time consuming and fraught with potential catastrophic (to the hide and thus the reata) screw ups that part way through, he bought a hide already processed. This was just getting the hide to the stage where you would start tanning. I'm not trying to discourage you in the least, just letting you know its a lot of tedious work. I did a couple of rabbit skins when I was a kid that came out pretty good. Even those little guys were a lot of scraping. For a sheath you are gonna want a firm leather which means veg tan. I've heard of guys dumping a hide in an old oak stump that was hollowed out and full of water. You might investigate that. Good luck. I too would be interested to see how your efforts turn out.
 
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