Oak Gall Tanning Experiment and CASE HARDENING PANIC! AHHHH!!!!

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I experimented tanning some skin samples with fresh oak gall juice. It's a good opportunity to talk about a few things, including case hardening, which everyone is terrified of, but which is not very common. It is much more common to make tanning solutions too weak and not replenish them often enough.

Oak galls are created when an insect lays it's eggs in a tree and some sort of chemical signal tricks the tree into growing a house for the insects offspring. Galls are typically very high in tannin and have been used in tanning, dying, ink making and medicine. These galls are from Quercus Lobata, the California Valley, White Oak. They are large and dense for oak galls. The fresh ones are very juicy and can be squeezed to extract a clear juice.

Using the clear juice caused case hardening, an effect where the skin is shocked and drastically shrunken by too strong tannins. It makes the skin stiff and doesn't allow the hide to continue tanning. That was in straight gall juice though. When the juice was diluted by 50% with water, no case hardening effect occured. People should be less afraid of case hardening than of not using enough tannin to replenish the solution as it is used up.

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