Home made leather balm

In this blog we’re going to be looking at how to make a leather care balm, but first what is that and why is it important.

I don’t know about you but I certainly find myself using a lot of leather items when I’m spending time in the wild, be it my boots, belt, gloves, knife sheath or axe mask it’s a wonderfully versatile material to craft and use, its generally fairly durable but after long use, particularly during wet weathers, your leather can start to dry out, become brittle and crack. We often prevent this from happening by rehydrating the leather with oils, fats, and waxes and there’s a plethora of products out there designed to do this but I had the ingredients to make some and I’d never done it before so an experiment was born.

To start with I wanted my leather to be supple and hydrated, a great oil for doing this is neatsfoot oil as it penetrates deeply into the fibres of the leather keeping it soft and pliable. I’ve also incorporated some rendered deer tallow into the mix as I know that it is great for human skin when used in balms and salves as it is quite readily absorbed, so by my logic it should also be good for leather.

I also wanted my leather to keep out the elements so I’ve added some natural beeswax, not so much for its conditioning properties but to help the treated leather repel water and act as a barrier layer keeping oils in

What you will need

• A method of heat, could be a cooker or a fire I’m using a Trangia
• A container to heat water, again I’m using the Trangia pot
• A second container to melt your balm in, I used an empty boot wax tin but you could use a larger container and make more
• Neatsfoot oil
• Beeswax, best sliced into shavings or grated
• Rendered tallow, I used deer that I rendered myself but you could buy rendered beef tallow if you can’t get deer
• Something to stir it up with

Method

First you want to grab the container you’re going to heat your water in, then put your other container inside and add water to your boiling container (the big outside one) until it covers about a quarter of the smaller inner container.

Add a mixture of beeswax and tallow to your inner container, now ratios do make a difference to the final product too much oil and it will be very soft, sometimes even runny which while it would work well for the leather it can be a pain to store and apply. Too much wax and it will be too hard to rub in effectively, so I’d say start with a 50/25/25 ratio of oil to wax and tallow and adjust the final product to your liking

Next start to gently heat the mixture until it begins to melt, obviously being mindful of the various potential hazards of exposed flames, hot water and molten wax/oil mixtures (maybe time to stick those nice leather bushcraft gloves on). If the water begins to boil try to avoid it splashing into your mixture, turn it down if you need to.

The wax and tallow will melt at different rates and you’ll end up with a mixture of solid semi solid and liquid in your middle container. You could be mature and adult about it and just leave it to do its thing and melt by itself but I personally couldn’t help myself and had to give it a helping hand with liberal amounts of poking and prodding which was fairly satisfying in its own right.

Once everything has melted and you’ve given the mixture a stir to combine the different ingredients it’s time to remove it from the heat and allow it to cool. Once mine was cool I decided it was a bit soft for me so I reheated it and added a little more wax which got it to the constancy I was looking for.

Once it’s cooled its ready to use, I got a bit of cotton rag and used that to apply it to my boots and gloves and it seemed to rehydrate the leather well. After it was rubbed in and allowed to dry it has given a decent level of water protection to my boots so I’d call that experiment a success. I’ll be making a larger batch next time.