When thawing fresh frozen or tanned capes, can this be done in water to help speed the thawing process? Do you need to add anything to the water when doing this? Will this cause any ill effects?
Thanks Alot,
Allen
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You can use warm water - around 25C with at least 40gms per litre of salt dissolved in it. Remember that it is a race between your ability to get preserving chemicals (the salt) into the hide before the bacteria warms up and becomes active and so starts destroying the hair roots, and causing slippage. Make sure you open up the skin as it defrosts and move it about so that the salt can get into it.
As soon as the skin is defrosted, make up a fresh salt water soak with a bit of detergent to clean the fur and leather (with a bit of agitation this should take an hour or so)and then flesh the skin and get it in into a pickle. The salted water is only a temporary preservative. The skin needs to be pickled to ensure a good preservation.
Note: fleshing at this stage means getting rid of the sloppy flesh layer. Do not try and thin down the leather at this stage. This is done after pickling as the pickling process tightens up the leather fibres and changes the cutting charateristics of the leather and this makes the thinning down process much easier. If the leather is really thick do this process in two steps.