 Welcome back to the great outdoors everyone. I recently went on another Deer hunting trip this time I took my dad and I was unsuccessful with my bow once again, but I sent LFD out with the 308 and He was able to harvest his first ever Whitetail doe. It was good father-son time around the skinning rack and I decided let's go ahead and take dad's high Instead of throwing it away and we'll make some rawhide out of it after processing the meat at home I decided to flip on the camera and take you guys along with me as I try to make rawhide for the first time So here we go. The first question many of you probably ask is why would you even want to make rawhide? And the reason is for backing bows. I make self bows now and Rawhide is a fantastic material for putting a backing on your bow that strengthens it It's sort of an insurance policy that you're not gonna have any splintering especially on Weaker woods or even strong woods that you're just a little scared that they might splinter This is something that I normally purchase So I thought I could make it on my own save a little money And also it's just cool to back your own bows with a deer that you harvested And the first step is Fleshing the hide and this process is simply thrown it on the fleshing beam Taking a fleshing knife and pushing all the excess fat and meat off the skin This is the second time that I flushed a hide and honestly this time was even faster It took me about an hour just because I never froze it I brought it straight home and it came off of the skin a lot easier this time Sometimes there's some really tough parts and I'll just take my skinning knife Sort of scrape those areas off and then cut off any excess parts that I'm not gonna use Next thing that I'm doing is just rinsing the hide this animals never had a bath in its life So I'm just getting all the oil the dirt the blood everything like that off of it After a few rinses and the water's clean I'm gonna throw it in this bucket put a big rock on top of it to keep it submerged and Wait until the hair starts to fall out Now it's time for something. I've never done before and it's taken all the hair off of this whitetail deer Getting this hair off is way harder than I was expecting At this point I should have just thrown it back in the bucket and let it soak for longer Until that bacteria starts to let that hair fall out even more But I was stubborn and I went ahead and just pushed through the sides and the belly came off pretty easily But that scruff was difficult to get all the hair off In this process I'm taking the hair off But I'm also trying to get a very thin layer of skin that the hair follicles were sitting in and once you get that off The skin sort of turns like this bluish color the scruff area I had to use a skinning knife just to sort of cut the fur out because there was no way I was pushing through it With the fleshing knife. I finally finish up the hair removal process and my Forearms and shoulders and hands are just tired from doing it took way longer than I expected And it's because I made a mistake. I took the hide out of the water too early. I waited a little over a week Shoo this thing's got a little stank to it. That's why I took it out because it was starting to stink a little bit But really I should have waited probably two weeks with it being Current temperatures, you know in the 50s So to complete the process now all we have to do is let it dry then it turns into raw hide So I'm gonna take some paracord. I'm gonna string it between two trees here And we're going to just string it up And I went ahead and I let it soak overnight again just to give me an opportunity to get these These little spots that I missed And just basically pluck them out with my hands We got it strung up guys. I really like this method. So this is my second time stringing up a hide This one obviously is different because it doesn't have the hair on it But the first time I did it on a frame on a metal frame And it was very difficult because the string was sliding around as I was looping it through running it through with long strings Running the paracord between two trees is an awesome method I'm going to use this from now on and you could use this in the woods You could use it at your deer camp if you're backpacking spike, you know spike camping You could do this between two trees and I like the way it makes this like overall trampoline type effect about three feet or so Side to side so I'll cut out strips lay two of them overlay them in the middle And then that'll be in my backing for these both So I'll probably get about six clean strips out of it with all the holes didn't do the best job on the on the skinning rack But it'll get the job done. So we'll wait for this to dry and then we'll cut it out When I started this process a lot of the leaves were still on the trees and changing colors And now they're just barely hanging on So been about a week and a half This skin is pretty much dry now it's been Over a day since I strung it up I would like to hang it longer let it dry longer out here, but it's going to rain tonight Even covering it with the moisture in there. I just want to go ahead cut it cut it up into the strips I think it's gonna be make a good backing and I've just taken my knife and a little bit of sandpaper Just take it off some of the debris You know basically smooth it out a little bit. So I'll get a good consistent back when I go to glue this On a bow So now we'll just cut it out Have it right there guys this stuff kind of Has the feeling of like a thin flooring vinyl, but it's extremely tough material It's pretty amazing and I've been buying this in rawhide form to back my bows with But now I have my own I can probably do three or four bows with the amount that I have I'll take the extra scrap pieces and I'll use it for other stuff It's just an amazing material and if you tan this and make it soft it turns into another hundred uses so if you guys want to get creative get kind of Primitive on your year this year skin them up. It's it's kind of a fun project to do And it is satisfying when you come out with with something like this It's amazing that this was on a living deer just a few weeks ago And and now I can I can use it to back my bows that I'll I'll hunt with next year and get another deer and continue the process So I hope you guys like watching today's video sort of a different video. It's sort of a chill relax grab a beverage hangout enjoy the you know me doing all the work basically and Just kind of chilling so let me know if you like that style video And I will do more of these where I'm just showing more of my Hands doing a lot of the work. I usually make choppy sort of vlogs But I just kind of wanted to show more of the process on this So let me know in the comments down below and thank you guys for hanging with me And I'll see you guys in the great outdoors