Hey all, I have seen snake skinned bows and some carp skinned bows. Is there any way I could do a smallmouth bass skin. and if so how? What do I do to prepare the skins and such? Could I just fillet the fish and cut off the scales? Wow didn't mean to have so many questions sorry. Thanks for any info.

Sorry not sure if it is legal as it is a gamefish, but you can eat them. Just don't know if it can be done.

Sorry not sure if it is legal as it is a gamefish, but you can eat them. Just don't know if it can be done.

my guess would be if its a legal fish and your not selling it you could do whatever you want with the skin.I would scale it first then carefully skin it as fish skin is very thin.If you try please post pics,I'm curious as to how it would turn out.

IMO, too small & too thin to manage a backed bow.

It would be very thin but so are some of the copperheads I deal with. I am into skin splicing to use short skins for bow backing so i am sure you could back a bow with smallmouth skins if you had enough that are pretty close to the same color.

Here is a splice on one of my short skin copperhead bows. It was invisible until I tried to enhance the color with a little leather dye. The dye soaked into the edge of the skin making a dark spot.

   

The reason I was using leather dye was one skin had two hourglasses that were completely without color so I drew them in with dye. Next I used the same dye on every hour glass to give me a good color match from one end of the bow to the other. The darker centers of the skin you see in the picture have been dyed with medium brown leather dye.

After skinning fish, or snake , what method do you use to prepare skin?
            Pete

The main thing with fish is to remove some of the oil.
A scrub brush with some Dawn dish soap works well. Then rinse and freeze if not using them right away.

TB111 glue works well.
Ron

Here is the link to a Skin-A-Long

http://www.primitivearcher.com/smf/index.php/topic,12105.0.html
Ron

ttt