Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Predators and Varmints tanning coyote skins??

I've been tanning skins for more then 30 years, since I had it as a School project as a kid. It's not technically difficult, but it does take some labor effort.

After skinning you should remove all large pieces of fat and meat. No need to scrape down to the actual skin at this point, but the bigger stuff of more then 3/16" thick should be shaved off the skin. This takes a while unless you have a nice smooth piece of wood coming to a slight or blunt end with rounded edges to lay the skin over for this process. With out this board your gonna have a bit more effort to shave it down easy. You can see what this looks like by doing a web search for "Fleshing beams"

Once you have tired of this fleshing process, you can dump some fine ground salt on the skin side and leave it for a few days. This cannot be over done. You can leave the skin this way forever without any failure. However since we are tanning and not storing you can shake the salt out after 24-36 hours and redo this one more time. Make sure the skin can drain. Lots of fluids will be pulled out by the salt. These fluids need to be drained away from the skin.

Once this is complete you should pickle the hide. This is the first step of the technical process. There are a whole bunch of ways to do this, but over the last couple years I have just settled on Rittels products to pickle and tan the skins.

It's very safe and the least caustic, and makes a fine soft skin that looks very good. I think if you do a web search or maybe even type in Rittels EZ-100 tanning on Ebay. I buy the stuff in larger quantities and have it on hand all the time. However I did tell a buddy to buy the same stuff and he called me back saying he had found the whole "kit" on line.

You will probably find suppliers for this "kit". It should have pickling fluid, tanning powder that you need to mix with warm water, and the hide oil to convert the dry skin to soft leather.

Other then this you need to have lots of salt and a plastic container that will hold 3-5 gallons of water.

As with any project like this, the more effort you put into the skin to clean it up after skinning the less you will have through the process, and the better the result will be. I have used PH strips to test the formulas in the past, but I have also done this without any PH checking at all. It's never failed me either way.

I did a Raccoon for my son a week ago and it's a perfect tanned hide that you would be hard pressed to find more well done. The biggest reason for failure in tanning is salting the skin with too much fat and meat on the skin. The salt will dry and cure the meat and sinew. It will not have any effect on fat. So get all the fat off and after salting you should be fine.