Making Rawhide

[deerskins]

Today was a productive day.
My dununs (West-African barrel drums) need new heads and our group decided to put some energy forward and make them ourselves.
The cow was raised by one of the group members as he is a organic beef farmer.
This was our first attempt, not perfect, but not bad.
In the near future, we will do a couple more and a buffalo from the buffalo ranch down the road.
I heard a rumor that you can flesh the skins with a pressure washer and my friend who raises the cows has one, so we went for it that route.
While it is not work free by any means, I think it sure beats scraping!
Here's the pictures.....

let's start with the skin, ears and all...

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You can see on the bottom of the skin that I started to cut away the edge to remove the uncleaned sections as much as possible.
But my friend had to get back to his cattle before dark to check for new calves.
So, we put the skin in the carport and I finished trimming in there.

[deerskins]

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[tactik]

Thanks for posting!

I bought some rawhide from a guy here in Australia and enjoyed making my own heads... the smell of wet hair and rawhide is something I could do without though...

Is the shampoo to clean the mud and bits of crap off??
Wouldn't it strip away a lot of the oils as well though?
Was it baby-shampoo or... ?

[Sakuntu]

Good Stuff! I follow these same steps with whitetail deer hides. I never thought about a power washer though. Great idea! How will you get the hair off? Scraping? Being that I like the look and feel of the skin grain, I usually soak the skin in water mixed with Hydrated lime for a few days. The skin pulls out easily after that. Keep posting pix of your next stages!

[deerskins]

I used half a bottle of cheap stuff from the dollar store (50 cents worth).
It is used because the hair is very dirty with blood and goo all over it.
I'm not too concerned about taking away the oils, there are plenty to go around at this stage.
As far as removing hair goes, I will use some clippers to take it down to about 1/8 inch or so as dununs have a little hair on them to take out the sustain and make a nice dry sound.
Looks like I will be getting some lamb skin soon, I think I'll scrape that one by hand for a djembe skin. It should be very similar to the common goat skin that everyone else uses except it will be raised locally, killed by a friend and eaten by many.

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One week later....all dry.