German Harness Leather: Limed, Bated and Bark-Tanned Hides Greased With Linseed Oil and Tallow (Davis, 1885)

"Special attention should be paid to this process, as soft leather can only be produced by proper bating, while too much bating is injurious, as it destroys the skin fibres and the grain."

Use green hides if possible. Cut out the horns, soak in running water 6 to 8 hours with frequent rinsing (not longer, or water-stripes form), clean off dung, and lay in weak milk of lime for 24 hours; take out, make fresh lime and replace for 24 hours more, then handle regularly. Salted hides need 3 days' soaking to remove all salt; dried hides are soaked and stretched back to shape.

Unhair as soon as the hair pulls out easily, soak a few hours, flesh, soak 24 hours and smooth. Bate for 1 to 3 days by thickness and weather, handling three times a day; neither too little nor too much. Rinse, smooth again, soak several hours and work the flesh side thoroughly with a dull fleshing knife.

Lay the hides in old liquor 1 or 2 days. Take them out, ladle out the old tan, add one third of a bushel of fresh tan and replace; the tan is spent in 4 to 8 days, so freshen the vat two or three times more. Then put them in the lay-aways, about as long as sole leather (stout harness leather may need longer). Split a hide after the second layer: uniformly brown through means tanned; pale yellow or white means not.

Split into sides and number both halves alike. Rinse in old ooze and smooth with a dull fleshing knife on the beam. Choose the best hides for harness. Go over the leather with a fine-edged knife, grease the flesh side with linseed oil and tallow, and hang it up to dry.

Sort into brown and black. Brown is sold as it is or given lustre by glassing. Black is grounded with a decoction of logwood, blacked with iron black and, when nearly dry, pressed.

From Charles Thomas Davis, **The Manufacture of Leather** (Philadelphia, 1885), chapter XXXI (checked on the archive.org scan manufactureoflea01davi, pp. 518-521). He does not give the bate's composition, which tan, or the lime and oil-and-tallow quantities here; oak bark for the tan is our choice. The diagram hero and the tools are ours.