The Armour Archive

How long can you soak it before it starts to break down?

Do you mean till it starts to become flexible, or untill it starts to disintegrate? Flexible 8 hours, less if you use warm water. Didintegrate? That sounds like a science experiment.

A very long time -- it depends on how clean your water and your hide are, and what crap various folks may have put into it if it's a chew-toy rather than a straight rawhide.

Don't leave it in for 24 hours. I had a disgusting bucket of milky water that smelled just about two steps above entrails.

I've had rawhide sitting wet in a bucket for two WEEKS without issue. It really is an issue of hide, cleanliness, and contamination.

Fair point, Russ. When that happened, I'd been using chew-toy bones, and they'd stuffed some kind of mixture in the center of the bone.

And if they are from China, saturated in formaldehyde or ammonia as a preservative. The expectation is those compounds will gas off significantly during transport. Ick.

It's a function of time, temperature, rawhide thickness, and agitation(of the rawhide, not you!). Thin rawhide can be flexible in 5-15 minutes and squishy in an hour, specially if it's warm and you move it around a little. Thick rawhide can take hours to get flexible in colder temperatures. Warm water helps. In the summer, even inside the soaking water starts getting funky within 24 hours. In the winter it can take days.

If you tell us what kind of rawhide (Goat, calf, bull, deer etc.) and how thick, I might be able to answer better.

Bjorn

The water basicly becomes a protean bath over time ripe for bacteria growth.
The same think happens if your soaking bones for stock how fast it gets funky can vary a bit but if you play with the chemisty level of the water it can give you a lot more time before bacteria start doing bad things.

I left chew toy strips and a hide in my tub for a couple of days in the past.

Losthelm: yeah, that's part and parcel of tanning. Some rot can be beneficial (say, if you're trying to slip the hair off a hide), but all the things you'd do to slow down bacteria apply -- cold water especially. Nothing says "germ spa" like a tub full of nice somewhat-warm water.

"germ spa" too funny. I have just used a 5 gal plastic paint bucket of cold water. Took about a day or so before I could work it. I used chew toys and foung there was some amount of goo to rinse off the dead animal bits before I could use them.