Home Tan

[krank]

Any good detergent or dish soap does the job fine and its safe.

[deerhunter]

I always use Ivory dish soap 

[krank]

No such thing as ivory dish soap anymore. It is now called dish lotion and is not very good. Dawn is the only dish soap left that works. They took the phosphates out of everything else and renamed it.

[deerhunter]

Really!I haven't did any hides since I ran out of Ivory soap I had leftover from when I had wool sheep we would wash the wool with it and I had quite a bit of it leftover. 

[krank]

I used ivory soap to knock the rust out of gas cans. Worked like magic. Not any more.

[deerhunter]

You should have seen how good it worked on greasy ,crap caked wool . The wool would be neon white. Sad to see a good product messed up.

[krank]

The consumer was robbed. Phosphates do no damage. Reason for the ban was it caused etrostification (algae bloom) in municipal water so every time they released raw sewage into public water they were immediately busted by a green cloud of algae. Proctor and Gamble said they voluntarily complied and have yet to engineer anything that worked as good as phosphate.

Whats funny is appliance companies were swamped with complaints that dishwashers weren't cleaning well and it took them a while to figure out the new soap products were not cutting the mustard. People started selling real soap on e-bay.

There is a janitorial company in St. Louis that sells commercial grade soap with phosphates and public demand has overwelmed their business to the point that all they do anymore is sell real soap on-line.

I buy trisodiumphosphate at the paint store and add it to bucket to make it cut grease.


Dawn still works....

[krank]

I tried to make this simple. The salt/alum tan works. Over the years that is how I show people who want to start. Then I see Rittels and they push the safety-acid.

That is an optional step that gives you a deeper tan. Before tanning you mix up an acid and salt bath. Putting hide in for a day or two puckers the leather for penetration and alters the pH to assist the pickle tan.

I use citric acid from Amazon but some use the citric acid cleaner that Walmart sells for $10.