How to Tan a Deer Hide at Home

Follow these steps for tanning a deer hide, complete with time requirements and tool recommendations, to make your own beautiful, quality leather.

By Dennis Biswell
Updated on September 15, 2023
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by FurSource.com
Learn how to process wild-animal hides to round out your self-sufficiency skills.

Follow these steps for tanning a deer hide (at home) with hair on and with hair off techniques, complete with time requirements and tool recommendations, to make your own beautiful, quality leather.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been an outdoors person. I spend most of my free time hunting, fishing, canoeing, and kayaking. This lifestyle came naturally, as my mother and father sent my siblings and me outdoors as much as possible. My family also processed much of what we ate at home. Whether we were butchering cattle, hogs, chickens, and all varieties of wild game or canning meats, garden vegetables, and fruit from my grandfather’s orchard, my family and I knew where our food came from.

However, after our successful hunting trips, no one in my family tanned any of the animal skins. Those were hauled to the local locker plant and were then sent to a commercial tannery. Several years ago, I started experimenting with tanning deer and other wild animal skins so I could become self-sufficient in this part of processing, too. I eventually honed in on a step-by-step process that creates durable hair-on hides and good, wearable leather from deer skins.

Home Tanning Equipment and Supplies

You can buy most of the equipment you’ll need to tan a deer skin — or a few smaller skins — at a local hardware store. Gather a large plastic trash barrel that will hold from 20 to 32 gallons; an 8-gallon tub; plastic sheeting or an old tarp; 6 feet of 4-to-6-inch-diameter PVC pipe to serve as a fleshing beam; sawhorses and a sheet of 4-by-4-foot plywood to use as a drying rack; protective gloves and eyewear; and a stirring stick (I use an old piece of 1-1/2-inch PVC pipe that’s about 4 feet long). You’ll also need a skinning knife or a drawknife, which you can purchase from a sporting goods store, and a fleshing knife, which you can source from a taxidermy supply business.

three tanning tools on a white table
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