Hi all, first time tanner here and I know my first attempt might've been overly ambitious, I just want to know if what I have is even salvageable, I kinda gave up but the rot was fairly localized to a couple areas and now it's fully dried back out.

I'm wondering if I could maybe soak it again and then give tanning another go with a better tanning solution.

My process:

(buckle up, I didn't realize it would be this long of a post, sorry in advance)

I got the hide free with the purchase of a whole beef, under the condition that I pick it up from the processor an hour away from home. I got a 40 gallon trash bin and some ice to surround it with and keep it cool for the drive home. The hide had been in a walk in cooler for maybe a little more than 24 hours by the time I got there so idk how long it took it to cool.

When I got home I cut it into a somewhat more manageable size by cutting it in half from neck to tail, putting the other piece into my deep freezer to try to tan later. I then put the hide in some heavily salted ice water to keep it until the next day when I'd be able to start rough fleshing it.

I cut off the majority of the bigger pieces of fat and meat, and attempted to start fleshing as well with the backside of a drawknife. I didn't make much progress as my technique wasn't great yet and my (plastic, foldable) table kept wobbling back and forth, taking some of the force out of each stroke as I fleshed the hide.

I then salted the hide using a 1 to 1 ratio of hide to salt, folded it membrane sides together and rolled it up so as to allow it to drain for 48 hours. I then repeated this process once more.

After the second salting was finished, I wiped off the excess salt and attempted to scrape off more of the membrane as some of it was easier to remove this time. Finally, I rinsed off the remainder of the salt and added it to a borax bath (1oz to 1gal water) and let it sit for 5 days, stirring it often.

The hair had begun to slip a little (which is what I wanted) and over the next 2 days I attempted to really flesh it to the best of my ability, trying different techniques and tools as I did.

Eventually I found that using a round wooden fence post wedged into one of the holes of a cinder block placed up against my house kept it fairly stable as I draped the hide up and over the post and pressed my belly against it to keep it from slipping down the pole.

I also used a metal file to make serrations in the backside of my drawknife to help it catch the membrane more effectively. It was still very hard work (my triceps ACHED like they never have before) but worked MUCH better than it had previously, I found that I kept almost gouging the hide while still somehow leaving the membrane intact when using the flat side of the drawknife. Adding serrations helped get rid of this problem.

After I felt like I'd gotten a significant amount of membrane off, I added the hide to a lime bath to cause the hair to slip enough to allow me to remove it (8lbs lime / 50gal water), I let it sit for 5 days (probably too long in hindsight, it was HOT this time of year) and stirred it at least 2x daily

I took it out and de-haired it with zero issue, again using my serrated drawknife. In my research I read that it was recommended to make sure to get the "cheesy" layer of skin off where the roots of hair live too but I didn't really understand what that meant even after scraping all the hair off.

I rinsed the hide off very thoroughly using at least 3 changes of water in my trash bin container, and then let it sit overnight in the fourth change of water. In the morning I dumped the water out again and added 2.5 qts. of vinegar to soak in overnight. I emptied it and refreshed the water and let it sit once more.

*Note: I think the vinegar I used caused a strange chemical reaction, because I had no other vinegar at the moment and was being cheap, I used some of the leftover vinegar that had been used in a vinegar bath for rusty cast iron, it caused very stubborn rust stains that were both red and an odd almost sick-looking green color as it sat overnight, I worried at first that it had maybe rotted overnight somehow but it didn't smell bad, and I thought it might end up looking kinda cool once I added the bark tan so I wasn't worried, now I fear it may have changed the way the hide tanned over all. I should maybe also mention that my well water is extremely hard and turns yellow/rust colored within like a day or two.

Finally it was time for the final membrane removal and the bark tan (I think this was my primary fuckup), I had a pinched nerve in my shoulder and knew I was on borrowed time with my hide the longer it was sitting outside in the heat and not in a tanning solution so I had to move quickly. I rented a power washer from Menards and munched through what remained of the membrane. 10/10 will 100% be doing that again as it worked incredibly well.

I'd seen some natural cedar mulch at my local Menards and looked it up to see if cedar wood is high in tannins, Google said yes so I purchased them. This may have been a mistake. I boiled two large stock pots full of cedar mulch and dumped them into a second trash bin over even more mulch I'd put into the bin (I used soft water for this part and left it open to allow rain to fall into the bin too). I then let this sit and stew in the 95°F+ sunlight for about 5 days before the final fleshing / intro to bark tea.

Unfortunately, once I got to the bark tea part it had been about a month of working to tan this heavy ass hide in the July heat, I was sick and tired of this whole process and so incredibly sore by this point and figured, what could it really hurt if I just put the hide right in with the mulchy bark tea? I'll just strain it later, and maybe it'll help add extra tannins as it continues to sit in the hot sun, right??

And so it began, I definitely didn't stir it enough, and completely forgot to taste my bark tea to test the tannins. So I wasn't terribly surprised when it began to stink (literally smelled like the worst bad breath ever) later on. I figured it was just regular tanning funk, but about 2 weeks in I pulled out my hide to find it had turned jet black (I'm thinking as a result of the chemical reaction between the rust and the tannins? Idk) and had some spots that were clearly getting munched on by bacteria. I cut these spots out with a wideish margin and rebrewed some bark tea, this time using cocoa mulch as I'd read it had even MORE tannins, plus it smelled good and I hoped it would maybe get rid of some of the funk (wrong, it smelled like chocolate halitosis).

So I just gave up and dumped it all out, it's currently sitting outside as I put off throwing it away until it dried so it wasn't crazy stinky, and honestly, I put so much work into it already that it's been hard to just toss it.

TL;DR Is my hide at all salvageable?

hello,

I’ve been trying my hand at processing some roadkill into furs. I’ve gotten a few pademelons that I’ve skinned and frozen, defleshed, and tanned in willow bark tea.

I’m not confident in my defleshing.

I’m yet to oil the hides but the pictures show how they look after i took them out of the tanning solution, rinsed them, and let them hang out to dry (haven't yet had time to oil). Do they look right? I’m confused by the glossy patches compared to the rougher pink/orange patches.

They don’t smell as clean as i would have expected.

I’m very new to all this so I’m open to any feedback.

I finished my cow hide today! Thank you all that helped along the way.

So this is my second summer practicing traditional tanning skills and I’ve been having some trouble during the hair removal stage with both brain tanning and bark tanning. Last year I had three deer hides to brain tan. On the first two I used a lye water solution to slip the hair but I wanted to try just water on the last one. In doing so, I got the hair to slip but with no lye the hide started to decay and stink by the time the hair slipped. I was able to save it by putting it back into a lye water solution. This year I began to attempt bark tanning. Instead of lye I decide to try lime because it was less caustic. I had the same result with the lime as with plain water. By the time I had the hair slip it had begun to smell even after using a little over a pound of lime powder per gallon of water. Unfortunately I had to leave town for a few days so with little to do about it I put them in the bark tanning solution and hoped against hope it would be okay. As I expected, when I got home they stunk far worse than when I left them. One of the hides appears to be green all the way through in some spots but all I have left to do is learn from this so I am still trying to save them to see what happens. My questions are this: how do people mitigate the hide from completely rotting (without use of heavily caustic items) when hair slipping is effectively a controlled decay process. And also, every time I get the hair to slip easily on one spot (usually on the back between rump and neck) it seems that the rest of the hide still holds onto it tightly and it can’t be removed without tremendous force which can damage the grain, which I don’t want to do when bark tanning. Any help is appreciated.