Beaver Tail

I wanted to put together a video here and now the sort of a follow-up from the beaver trapping trip and one of the things I'm not talking about the light but you may as well make beaver leather and this has got some really amazing texture to it. It's really durable. There's a place in Iowa called specialty leather products. They do them for $6. 50 a side now. A side is once you cut them They don't want it solid. They don't want nothing. Supposedly it sets the grease into the leather and it makes it weird for making a finished product before they die. Bottom line is just one more thing you can do to have a keepsake but good news is you still end up with this nice pile of fat here so that you can make that tail oil which is great. I'm going to try and do this without blocking the light in here for some reason. I'll stand off to the side. First step, have a good filet knife. I When we come right out the side Before they're down there I can get it to better. You can see that's a nice shoot straight for the middle. If you've fileted this is going to come in second nature. Same thing on the other side again keeping dead center in that. Just going to coast out as far down as we can. Again that looks good. We didn't cut in anything. So from there to get to first side off we will go up in here and again we're trying to stay above the tailgrain because I want to pull one off from the top but also stay close to it because it's pretty easy especially in these little ones to cut in. So we'll actually become the leather of the skin. So when I get it Just sort of coast down the top of the leather. Just making sure the basic rule of anything is to make sure you always know where that leather is versus your knife. We're just going to keep skinning it down And when you're first doing this you're definitely going to cut some holes in some especially if you're starting with a smaller tailgrain because that's not really what you'd expect. You can do anything you want. There's no end to the projects you can do. So then once I get it right up here, just Now I will tell you, if you only cut the sides down to there and try to rip it, you're in trouble especially with some of these smaller ones. But if you do Dive in the knife in there, centered on it, even on a smaller one it'll just sort of float down through there as long as it's a short knife. So to get the other side, I'm going to dive in As it flay, fish are going to have no problem picking this up. And the thing I The tail oil is great, great additive debate. Use it as a lure for itself to go trap other critters. And the leather is just something cool. I don'think I've seen the end of the project. So again once we get it about halfway down through, just go ahead and follow that thing out. And from there trim off that fat on the sides because it goes on our pile. Make tail oil with. There's actually even people in line that would probably buy that but I don't care to them. And then once we get to this point, it's almost the same as flam fish. It's nice to harden a little bit. I've been through a couple tails tonight. I didn't start at the evening I'll probably have to resharp and have to get to the rest of these. For the point of showing what we're doing here. I flip it over. Take it, I brush the hair back. I'm going to take another knife with a little more back then because we don't want to continue to dull a filet knife as fine as. That right there is all that it needs to be. Take that, throw it in the freezer and 650 aside. They'll get them back to you. I But as far as this leather here, that's chocolate brown. Black would also be another nice color. But I wanted something that was closer to natural. Brown and black are the only two options. You can go as crazy as you want to keep it green. I'll do this for you. That's nice and terrible. So at the end of that, and it probably looks a little bit simpler than it is, but again if you play a lot of fish it probably be an easy transition. And we have right there two finished pieces and that's heading your way towards making a project. Pretty much sky's the limit. But my personal favorite here is of course this tableau. It has a side effect. You can't really beat that to be able to make multiple products out of something. So the meat on beavers are really good to eat. You have the castor, you have the oil sacks and the oil itself. I separate the two out. One's good for making bait and lures as you dry them out. Castors of course are a resale item. You can sell the skulls. You can sell pretty much whatever. So The Darling Leather and Fur Company up there in Horsens Island, Michigan. This woman here Rebecca Darling does amazing work. She does my fur hats and everything else. So I'll put a link down there. It does look And again, specialty leather products in Iowa is pretty easy to find on Google. And don't quote me on it. The 650 side was what they were charging the last time they were. So no salt, nothing, just throw them, ship them frozen and it's a pretty simple sheet that you print off of their website. Now again with this fat here, that just gets thrown right in there. I might cut it up a little bit because the smaller it is, the faster it's going to render. Throw it in a glass chore. With an air lock on it that you buy the wine supply store so that everything can breathe as it's happening. And honestly, I run it on top of my furnace. There's really no smell. But s You can throw it out in the yard if you don't have any pets, they're going to mess with it because they'll be all over it otherwise. So hopefully that was helpful to somebody.