Welcome to You Ask Andy

  Martin Konikoff. age 8. of Albany, NY or his question:

How do they make leather?

Your shoes have already taken a real beating before you buy them. The leather has been salted. soaked. scraped. pummeled. rolled. oiled and dipped in and out of all kinds of chemical baths. This rough treatment is necessary to turn animal hides into durable leather.

Left alone. an animal hide would soon become dry and brittle. The dried out skin will dissolve in hot water. In time. it powders to dust. But when turned into leather. the hide stays soft and pliable. It won't melt in hot water. Your new shoes are waterproof. though a good dunking may make them stiff.

Decay starts as soon as the hide is taken from the animal. So leather treatment begins with the fresh hide. The inside is salted and maybe rubbed with alum. This keeps it from becoming dry and brittle until it gets to the leather factory. The hide is really three layers of tissue. The middle layer is the one used to make leather. The other two layers must be stripped away along with any hair or fur embedded in the skin.

The outer layer peels away after the hide has been soaked in vats of lime and maybe other chemicals. The hair is sweated out in a steam room lined with glazed white tiles. The fleshy. inside layer is scraped away. The hide is soaked  dried  oiled and pummeled. This process makes it pliable and keeps it that way. Salt and various acids are soaked in and washed out. This prevents decay and makes the leather durable.

The leather hide is then sent to be dyed. The dye stuff is tannin. Or tannic acid. It can be soaked from tree bark or made chemically from chromium salts. There is artwork in the tanner's job. Tannin from some trees makes hard leather. Tannin from other trees makes softer leather. The job may take a hundred days and a hundred baths. Even then. the tanner will have to even out blotches by hand.

A gloss is then applied to the outside of the tanned leather. It can be a mixture of  casin. milk and dye .  This shiny coat is often pressed in with smooth. glass rollers. Grained leathers take an extra beating. They are rolled with their inner side over blunt knives or stamped by hand. For suede leather. the inner side of the hide is skuffed to a velvety finish.

Chances are. your leather shoes were made from calf or cow hide. The soft uppers may have been tanned with hemlocks The sturdy soles may have been tanned with bark from a strong oak tree. The soles. of course. are several layers of leather tightly compressed together.

It took a long time; patience. know‑how and a lot of hard work to make the leather for your shoes.. So let’s give them a clean and a polish once in a while ‑ they deserve it.

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