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Old 07-31-2014, 03:29 PM   #1
Vynticator
 
Join Date: Jul 2012
Default Making fur or leather clothes

Intrepid but naked heroes trapped in remote wilderness. Given the skills, how easy would it be to improvise some clothing from, say, wolf pelts. They have only a knife to help them, and what tools and materials might be improvised from the Scandinavian landscape.

Is it possible at all, or do you need particular chemicals to make fur clothes?

Many thanks if you can help!
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Old 07-31-2014, 04:11 PM   #2
DanHoward
 
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Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Maitland, NSW, Australia
Default Re: Making fur or leather clothes

I'd love to see various options for calculating how much useful hide you'd get from a particular animal based on body shape and mass. And how much is needed to make a set of clothing. Regarding tanning, if you have no resources then brain tanning is the only real option.
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Old 07-31-2014, 04:49 PM   #3
Dalillama
 
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Default Re: Making fur or leather clothes

Quote:
Originally Posted by Vynticator View Post
Intrepid but naked heroes trapped in remote wilderness. Given the skills, how easy would it be to improvise some clothing from, say, wolf pelts. They have only a knife to help them, and what tools and materials might be improvised from the Scandinavian landscape.

Is it possible at all, or do you need particular chemicals to make fur clothes?

Many thanks if you can help!
The short answer is no, you don't need anything you don't have, although just a single knife will probably add a -1 or 2 penalty to Survival skill. Brains make a perfectly acceptable tanning solution.
For immediate use, you won't be able to tan it at all, and will have to settle for just scraping it; this is entirely possible, however. It will also be pretty crude because you won't have had time to process sinew into thread or bones into needles. It will not last for more than a month or so in wearable condition, and will start to be pretty unpleasant to wear sooner than that, but it beats freezing and will keep you going long enough to tan some other hides properly, a process which takes a few days, possibly up to a week depending on local climate (in Northwest Canada about 5 days, per my caribou-hunting cousin). Survival skill will help with tanning and making the tools mentioned, but Sewing is called for to make something wearable once you have them.
A good-sized wolf pelt is about enough for a smallish blanket or cape, or a robe for a SM-1 or smaller character, or a vest or possibly trousers for an SM 0 character. 3-3 1/2 wolfhides will be enough to kit an SM 0 character with pants, a top, foot coverings, hand coverings and a hat. Deer have slightly larger usable hides but aren't as warm. Reindeer are a good choice, they're bigger than wolves but have a good pelt on them. Avoid bears, you're not nearly well enough armed to try to get their pelts away from them.
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Old 07-31-2014, 06:09 PM   #4
Culture20
 
Join Date: Feb 2014
Default Re: Making fur or leather clothes

You could also smoke them to clean them up a little and help preserve them. Sewing them together would be more problematic, but you could use birch strips or wolf gut for that.
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Old 08-01-2014, 03:35 AM   #5
Verjigorm
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Charlotte, North Caroline, United States of America, Earth?
Default Re: Making fur or leather clothes

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Originally Posted by Culture20 View Post
You could also smoke them to clean them up a little and help preserve them. Sewing them together would be more problematic, but you could use birch strips or wolf gut for that.
If they only have a knife to work with, then that means no axe to cut down trees. So you would be reliant on deadfall, and even that is limited to what you can carry. So you would want to make a furnace and some sort of flue to trap the smoke and direct it to the hide(which you would want to make into a bag shape to catch the smoke). Really, that's preferable to an open flame because you can control it much better, as well as control the amount of fuel you waste.

A furnace can be readily made from rocks, but you need to seal the gaps with something. Where I live, it was customary for moonshiners to build their furnaces out of fieldstone and use the red clay that is widespread here to seal them up. But I don't know if Sweden has that sort of clay.
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