G,Day all and welcome to Aussie natural hide tanning. Let me tell you a little about myself and my family. We live in the remote far north Western Australia, in the Kimberly region. Here we have two seasons, the wet and the dry. Both sessions a great for tanning although the wet does get a little hot with temperatures reaching up to, and over, 40° degrees Celsius. But the heat here is known as a dry heat so the hides dry out quicker, sometimes too quick. I started tanning around eight years ago but found it very difficult to obtain skins. In Australia you cannot take road kill. So I got the next best thing, Kangaroo tails. That’s how I taught myself how to tan, using Kangaroo tails bought from a local Coles supermarket. From there I got in touch with tanneries in my state and found they are more than willing to sell to me, so I buy my hides salted and get them shipped to me by road train. A little costly but solved the problem of not having hides to tan. Through reading all I could, watching just about every you tube video on tanning and talking to tanners from different commercial tanneries throughout the country I slowly but surly built up the knowledge base I have today. Through my journey I noticed one thing that was lacking in almost everything I saw or read on tanning, that was a lack of in-depth detail on some of the steps. Making a video gave me the opportunity to show the viewer the things that I wasn’t sure on what to do when I started out tanning.
One of the main ways to tan is by using the brains of the animal but if you live in a hot humid area or a dry hot area like I do brains may not be the best thing to use as I found out when they started to go off fairly quickly leaving me with a stinky hide due to the brains going sour, still a good hide but a bit smelly. I came up across a formula using soy that doesn’t smell and gives a beautiful soft hide without the worry of getting an infection from the brain formula. After several months of tweaking the formula I came up with one that I was very pleased with that gave me great results for less effort. So, to sum it up, why did I start tanning simple, when I was seventeen, I wanted to learn how to tan a hide using natural ingrediencies. But back in the early eighties there wasn’t a lot of information on the subject till the internet was created. And the rest as they say is history.