How exactly to make elk leather

[Signatus]

I think the skin's weight and material usage is a compromise. An actual waterskin will require pitch for impermeability and some cord at least. It might also use bone for the nozzle.

While it depends on the waterskin being made, it seems that a good guideline is about 1 lb for the skin and about half a gallon of water capacity, which is an extra 4 lbs. However, I couldn't really find a detailed source for it. It seems that a smaller amount of leather (say, half a pound) can take as low as 0.83 lbs of water.

I guess that a big skin might take 1.5-2 lbs of leather (especially if from multiple small hides) and hold 5 to 6 gallons. More than that might simply not be practical or could damage the waterskin, no? This could also depend on the thickness of the skin. A 6 lbs skin is probably the most useful in order to pour a whole pot into it.

So the leather requirement makes some sense in order to balance it. I sometimes have 2 skins with me, one just for water and another for soup or more water.

All in all, the 0.3 lbs don't seem that farfetched. The water itself is what's going to weigh the most. You can bring the leather requirements down to 0.3, but that's also making it way too trivial IMO.

[JEB Davis]

Here is what I did a couple of years ago, my changes listed in commented lines at bottom.
I figure cutting the skin's rounded shape would leave lots of wasted leather and using some of the leather as strips to stitch the edges. It's just a roughly done recipe, not thought out in that much detail.


.Skin.   [effort:1] [phys:hands]  *COMMON* /120/   %40%   
{Leather} #3# [remove]
{Knife}
{*Cord} [remove]
[WEIGHT:1]
// Tying equipment changed to Cord
// DEFAULT JEB added [WEIGHT] (default was 0.3 pound), {Leather} was #4#

[Acolyte]

That's really wasteful - and I say this as someone who makes leather stuff. Throwing out 2lbs of leather to make a 1lbs object? You're throwing out twice the amount you're using. You can always find a use for those scraps (well, mostly). Those leather strips that you stitch with will also be part of the weight of the object as a whole not to mention 0.5lbs of tying equipment that should be what's used there.

I modded mine to require 0.4lbs of leather and 0.1lbs of tying equipment. For me it's not about game balance, it's about realism. Even with those stats it's pretty wasteful.

If you want a RL example go to a hobby store and pick up roll of leather thong (just lift it up, don't buy it unless you have a use for it) and consider just how much it takes to get a half pound of it.

   - Shane

[Signatus]

Are you sure that 0.4 lbs is enough to hold 4 lbs of water? This here is "large" but takes only 1.1 litre, about 2.5 lbs of water: https://www.etsy.com/listing/501655255/large-hand-crafted-authentic-medieval

I made some quick calculations assuming it was cylindrical and got a capacity (or volume) of little over 5 lbs of water, or about 2300 cubic centimetres. No idea why capacity seems so low compared to that.

Anyway, I seriously doubt this would be so light, though I might be wrong. 0.4 lbs is the weight of a hamster or a baseball...

This is a really hard topic to search for. Apparently leather is graded in ounces, based on its thickness per square foot. That's not very useful to understand how much it would weigh.

It seems that a rabbit pelt (with fur) is about those 0.4 lbs or a bit less. Would one rabbit hide be enough for a container like this that takes a bit over 4 lbs of water? Would you need thick leather for it? Won't the pitch or beeswax for waterproofing kind of add to the weight? How much leather would you need to wrap around a 2 litre bottle of soda?

[JEB Davis]

It appears this discussion could go on for some time, lol.
Correct, Acolyte, my mod is a poor compromise and I don't have knowledge of leatherworking you do.
Good points, Signatus.

In the end, any skin you find on a NPC or trade for in a village will be the stock one. This simple reality points out the tip of the iceberg when it comes to striving for realism in mods. You can't change what's generated by the game for NPCs unless you convince the devs to help.

[caius]

Does anyone have a dedicated location for tanning furs and processing leather?  I always build a cellar adjacent to a water tile and always "drop" the processing hides into the cellar to wait.  I think it might delay/slow the decay process.  But then again, maybe I am deluding myself. 

Maybe the de-hair process step wouldn't rot as quickly if done on a cellar?  I haven't tried in a long time and can't speak from personal experience.

[Acolyte]

Are you sure that 0.4 lbs is enough to hold 4 lbs of water? This here is "large" but takes only 1.1 litre, about 2.5 lbs of water: https://www.etsy.com/listing/501655255/large-hand-crafted-authentic-medieval

I made some quick calculations assuming it was cylindrical and got a capacity (or volume) of little over 5 lbs of water, or about 2300 cubic centimetres. No idea why capacity seems so low compared to that.

Anyway, I seriously doubt this would be so light, though I might be wrong. 0.4 lbs is the weight of a hamster or a baseball...

This is a really hard topic to search for. Apparently leather is graded in ounces, based on its thickness per square foot. That's not very useful to understand how much it would weigh.

It seems that a rabbit pelt (with fur) is about those 0.4 lbs or a bit less. Would one rabbit hide be enough for a container like this that takes a bit over 4 lbs of water? Would you need thick leather for it? Won't the pitch or beeswax for waterproofing kind of add to the weight? How much leather would you need to wrap around a 2 litre bottle of soda?

You are correct about a number of things here. 5lbs of water is a little over 2 litres so the skin would be about the size of a pop bottle. In terms of holding the weight some fairly thin leather would be fine for it - it's the waterproofing that's the problem.

Sources mention a couple of things. One is the use of a stomach or bladder from a large animal. One is using rawhide as wet rawhide doesn't let much water through it. Of course that involves drinking rawhide flavored water.....

Another interesting one is the use of a goat hide flesh side out hair in with apparently no additional waterproofing reputably used by the romans. Now, that climate is much hotter and drier so maybe they simply accepted some water loss or the water evaporated at roughly the same rate as it soaked through. This would have the side benefit of keeping the water inside cooler. Or maybe goat skin is more watertight than other skins - like seal skin is.

The Sami made theirs out of reindeer hide. Maybe this shares the characteristics of the aforementioned goat hide. Or, they waterproofed it.

In terms of waterproofing pitch would do, as would pine resin or bees wax. All of these would make the skin quite stiff. They would add a bit of weight, too, but I don't know if it would be significant. Birch oil would be possible, too. It's made as a step in making birch tar and birch tar is something we know was around. Birch oil would effectively make "Russian Leather" that is was sold as a valuable export for the very reason it was waterproof.

All in all, I think I might have to experiment and see what I can come up with. I'm not drinking out of a raw hide skin, though. 

   - Shane

[PALU]

I set up my homesteads by rapids, and my dedicated tanning location is the only border tile that isn't trapped. If rotting is reduced while tanning in a cellar (which I suspect it might), I consider it an exploit I won't use (which doesn't necessarily rule out using other exploits...).

However, I reschedule my activities when significant tanning activities occur (I may ignore bird leather that's lower than Superior at the current stage), and I've only had a very small number of hides degrade for reasons other than me forgetting to process them.

[Signatus]

On the issue of spoiling, I think in winter months you have more time. I'm pretty sure there was a specific winter hare fur that I left for days beside the rapids (I usually just have a Log + Club beside the water and always tan beside that tile) and it was still okay when I noticed I forgot it. Perhaps frozen temperatures keep it fresh, as with meat?

I saw a tutorial for making a leather skin which used only the hide. It was first shaped with clamps and something stuffing it, then stitched and boiled. It was waterproofed with beeswax into its insides and blowing into the skin, so the wax "pours" out of the stitches. It implied that the taste would improve or disappear with each washing or use.

[Acolyte]

Yep, I leave a log and either a stone or club by the water and tan there. Winter does seem to extend the life of each stage but I have had the carcass rot if I didn't butcher it right away. Seems that the carcass doesn't last longer in winter but the products from it do.

The boiled leather waterskin is quite hard, the boiling process rendering it into essentially hard leather armor - or what we would use as such. The leather does have to be thicker to avoid it becoming fragile and to avoid overtly distorting. This is how they made bottles in medieval times - which I believe is consistent with the timeframe for URW, so this is a viable look for the skin. In this case it would have to be heavier than the default skin to hold the amount of water that it does. A full pound or so wouln't be out of line IMO. It should be noted that most of these bottles (that we have, usually fragmented, examples of) seem to be much smaller with the largest holding about a 1L, maybe a little more. My view - and this I don't have documentation for keep in mind - is that for larger amounts of liquid medieval people would probably use wooden kegs of varying sizes.


   - Shane

Edit: I'm an idiot. All this time I'm wondering about waterproofing and forgot about using fat or tallow to do this. 

[Ara D.]

I personally wouldn't consider the cellar an exploit it Idea is cooler temperatures slow microbes growth rate, it is the microbes eating and breaking down the hide or meat at a cellular level that causes rot. So to my way of thinking a cellar slowing the process lines up with real life.

[PALU]

I personally wouldn't consider the cellar an exploit it Idea is cooler temperatures slow microbes growth rate, it is the microbes eating and breaking down the hide or meat at a cellular level that causes rot. So to my way of thinking a cellar slowing the process lines up with real life.

And I would guess those are the processes dehairing relies on, which is why I think it would be an exploit.

[Ara D.]

Went digging you are correct PALU. De-hairing is acomplished by proteolytic enzymes of fungal and bacterial origin that attack the protein at the base of the hair so cellar should slow the process down.

[PALU]

Thanks for checking. Facts are better than guesses.

[LoLotov]

If I may interject regarding the original post, the issue of wasting a fur on making leather/the dehairing process taking too long and ending up rotting is easily solved with hog or cow hides, which I believe both turn directly into leather in the normal tanning process much like bird hides. You have to hunt down wild boar or slaughter your livestock, but pretty sure they give at least 4-10 pounds leather each, as well as those skins being of more useful armor quality and faster to collect than bird skins. It seems significantly easier to find a hog (and potentially be able to drop multiple in one find) before you killed and processed enough birds to make the same amount of leather.