Brain Tanning a Goat Hide part 1

So, a few weeks ago I had a goat I had to butcher. Since he was my last oberhasli, I decided to try and tan the hide. I love the oberhasli coloring!  Now, this is my first time, but so far it's going fairly well.

First I killed, gutted and then skinned him. Then I cobbled together a scraping post from an old wooden fence post screwed to an upright 4x4 chunk. I took my scraping knife and sort of started in the middle and worked out toward the edges of the hide. Some parts of this were really easy and some not so much. I did go too deep in a few places but overall
I think I did fairly well. Especially since goatskin is very thin! Very! I'm doing this one hair on so I only had to do one side. Since I was a mess, the 5 yr old took the pictures so not the best, sorry!


This first picture shows, sort of, how I'm working from the middle outwards. If you look, you can see some of the spots where I scraped too deep.

 Here's a closeup of one of my 'oops' spots.

 

And then there's the completely scraped hide. 

Next, since this thing was filthy and smelled like a buck (he lived with the bucks) I washed it. I have an old part of 55 gallon plastic barrel that I used. I put in some dish soap, hydrogen peroxide and baking soda. I use this stuff on my dogs when they get sprayed by a skunk so I thought it might help deodorize the hide.

The hide in the water.

 In this one, you can kind of see how dirty the water was.

I actually did two washes and two rinses. It was amazing how dirty this goat was!

Then I cobbled together a stretching frame from 2x4's to stretch it and dry it. I am not sure if this step is necessary if you are going to go right into braining, but I was not. So I wanted to dry it for storage.


Here was my big mistake, I layed the hide on the grown to know how big to make my frame. The mistake was, I layed it skin side down instead of hair side down. In a picture below, you can see the huge mess that made on the hide.

Here it is, on the frame. I made small slits every 3-4 inches all the way around the hide. As you can see, I used baling twine to string it up. I went about it kind of like you do when putting on lug nuts on a car. I started at the top and did a few holes. Then I went around to the bottom and  tied it on tight. I continued that way, doing a few holes on one side and then going around to the opposite side.

 In this one, you can see the mess I made by laying it on the ground. The inside has a layer of mucus/slime on it and that stuff is like glue! There was no getting the dirt off. So I decided to dry it as is and take care of the mess later.

  

Lastly, I hung it up on the windmill and put a couple cattle panel around it keep the dogs off it. It only took a couple days to dry since the weather picked up the next day.

It was a perfect day to be doing this, cool but not cold. I even heard the first sandhill cranes of the year while outside working on it.

After the hide was dry, I took it down and used sandpaper to get all the stuck on dirt off. At the moment it is rolled up on a shelf in the house til I can get some brains and some warmer weather.