My latest venture into the knife making world will be to
create rawhide knife sheaths. It started
when I saw my first Karen Shook sheath for a Daniel Winkler knife. It was so freakin’ cool. There was no way of knowing how the thing was
put together or how much work went into it.
Hence the long time in between my first view and now.
A very nice knife maker in Mississippi named John Cohea thought that
type of sheath would fit his knives so he figured out his way of making
them. I recall a few years back when I
called John and asked if he could show me how to make them. He said yes but I never got over there. He works on a boat so he is gone almost 8
months out of the year. Well, following
him online resulted in finding out that he made a video on “Basic Rawhide
Sheath Construction”. I was lucky enough
to order the video before it even came out.
He gives a thorough demonstration of the entire process
which takes him quite a few hours to make.
After watching the videos a couple times so far I decided it’s time to
tackle this project.
As with most of my endeavors I try to do as much of it as
possible. So I start out by pulling two
deer hides out of the deep freeze. There’s
another on or two in there and a bunch of beaver hides waiting to be turned
into something useful. It takes at least
three days for the hides to thaw in the shop fridge. According to a guy online, he soaks the
hide for 24 hours before fleshing the hide.
This gets most of the fat and flesh off so it doesn’t rot.
Fleshing is a little easier after the soak but
it is kinda messy.
After getting off what I can the hides go into a barrel with water and wood ashes or you can use hydrated lime. There they will stay for 7 days, stirring daily to distribute the solution evenly. The result of this action is to cause all of the hair to slip off.
I thought that this would happen in the barrel and I’d pull
out two cleaned hides at the end of the week.
Nope. I pulled one out and put it
on my fleshing beam which is a piece of old pvc pipe that had split in a water
break. All it took to get the hair off
was scraping it with an old butcher knife.
I put a garbage bag at the bottom of the beam and all the hair went cleanly into the bag.
Next the hides had to be put into clean water for another 24
hours. This helps get the lye out of the
skin and neutralizes it. I stirred this
every time I passed the barrel.
The next day I built a frame to stretch the hide on. I pulled one of the hides out and started
punching holes along the edge and used jute twine to tie it to the frame. The process began with two pieces at one end
of the hide. Then I tied up the other
end and worked my way around the whole hide.
Everything was stretched as far as it would go. This helps to thin it out. You can see in the picture a new tool I made
to scrape the hide once it was stretched.
The scraping gets any bits of flesh that I didn’t get off before. This process took quite a while on the first
one. This hide turned out really nice
and it was thin all over.
Hide number two was quite a bit bigger and so darn thick in
some places. It had been in the freezer
for at least two years and had some bad spots on it that had to be addressed at
the initial fleshing. The frame for this
one measured 5 x 7 feet inside. It took
a bit more elbow grease to get this one stretched out. The hide had to weigh three times as much as
the first.
When I started scraping this hide I was thoroughly
disappointed in how little was coming off.
This hide had a lot more stuff attached to it that had to come off. I had seen a video of a guy using a wire
wheel to clean a hide so I got an angle grinder out and gave it a try. OMG!!!
What a quick way to clean it.
There was the drawback of stuff flinging all over the place. Next time I’ll do this outside. It was raining so I’ll use that as an excuse. It had to have saved me at least two hours of
work.
Now the hides have to dry for a while. The small one is probably ready to work with
but there is a lot of stuff going on right now so it will be a couple weeks
before I tackle the rawhide sheath itself.
Leslie will be at the Hole-In-Wall Show in Hohenwald, TN
this Friday and Saturday, May 2&3. I
will set up a small table at Ace Music Fest on Saturday May 3rd.
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