Leather Industry Glossary

Leather Industry Glossary - A collection of frequently used terms, abbreviations and jargons used in the Leather Industry with their definition and meanings.

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Paddles

A name applied to certain types of machinery with rotating arms, which are used in various tanning operations for agitating hides or skins in process. Use more water than drums, allowing larger floats and consequently gentler action. Mostly used in the soaking and liming areas.

Painting

A process for loosening hair or wool (usually the latter) which is employed with skins whose protective covering is so valuable as to make it desirable to avoid injuring it by soaking in a lime liquor. The process is carried out by painting the flesh side of a skin with a depilatory substance, containing sodium sulphide or arsenic. Nowadays this is the usual method with sheepskins bearing the higher grades of wool. Before it was invented, such skins were usually dehaired by sweating.

Parchment

See Pergamum.

Pasting

A method of drying where wet leather is pasted onto a glass or steel plate and then allowed to dry in controlled conditions - often a tunnel with various chambers adjusted to fit the planned removal of moisture. Most used with side leather. Holds the area well, but if not well retanned the leather can feel hard and empty. There is a danger of the paste damaging the grain or interfering with the finish. US tanners are most skilled in this drying method.

Pelt

This word means, strictly speaking, any kind of skin (Latin pellis, related to the German felle, a skin, and the English word fell, now preserved only in fellmonger). The word is somewhat loosely used in the leather industry, but its only common applications nowadays are to sheepskins in two or three slightly differing senses: to the skin proper, to distinguish it from the wool that grows on it; to dewooled sheepskins, as a pickled pelt or a fellmongered; or in some countries to a woolskin bearing the shortest recognised staple.

Pergamum

Town near Izmir (Smyrna) in Asia Minor. Parchment (from Latin "carta Pergamena") supposedly first made there in 3rd cent BC. When the King of Pergamus was building a great library in rivalry with the library of the King of Egypt in Alexandria, the latter placed an embargo on the exportation of papyrus from Egypt to hamper competition. The King of Pergamus thereupon perfected the manufacture of parchment for the making of books.

A more comprehensive discussion of this is given by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek.Since it is very interesting I quote from their website: Parchment was used chiefly for writing, first on a scroll - as is still the case in Israel - and from the second century BC onwards in book form. To make a book, the rectangular cut sheets might be folded one or more times. The skins of sheep and goats from the areas round the Mediterranean were rarely more than 50 cm long by 40 cm wide. In northern regions we find larger skins and also calfskins being used to make books. The term pergamena is first used in the Edict of Diocletian (301 AD); until that time the term membrana had been used. It is generally accepted that the use of a new term indicates a new or modified product, but so little is known about the parchment of those days that it is impossible to say with any certainty whether this was the case here.

One of our few informants about pre-Christian times is the (unreliable) Roman historian Pliny. He writes that the king of Pergamon (in present-day Turkey), Eumenes II (197-159 BC), was forced to look for alternative writing materials when the import of papyrus from Egypt was suspended. This is supposed to have led to the invention of parchment. Although parchment had been known at least eight hundred years before this date, Pergamon did have a reputation for good quality parchment in classical antiquity. The great change occurred around the fourth century AD, when people started manufacturing parchment using lime water. Until the fourth century skins were mostly treated with salt, flour and other vegetable products that were used to remove the hairs and to prepare the skin. The lime water method may have been introduced by Jews and Arabs to Spain in the early Middle Ages, after which it spread throughout the rest of Europe. Jewish parchment was lightly tanned on the surface with vegetable tannins. Another technique, the splitting of skins, was also known to the Jews and Arabs, even before the Middle Ages. In the West the traditional procedure to obtain the required thickness was to shave the full skin.

Formulas and depictions of parchment manufacturing have come down to us, especially from the late Middle Ages. There is considerable correspondencebetween these mediaeval formulas and those used by modern parchment makers, and even the processing and tools have not changed fundamentally. For the most part, parchment manufacture is still a matter of handwork.

Picker Leather

The picker is the mechanism on either side of a power loom that throws the sharp pointed shuttle and receives it again as it is thrown back. For arming this mechanism, long experience has found nothing equal to a special, very tough leather, usually rawhide - either cattle or buffalo. Such picker leather is made extensively in the North of England and in parts of the USA, partly from native cattle hides and partly from imported buffalo hides.

Pickling

A preliminary process for preparing hides and skins for tanning, largely by adjusting the pH with acid and controlling the swelling with salt. It is also use as stable way of holding material, after unhairing, for transport between plants and countries and for trading.