Splitting Sinews

When making cord I use sinew – its strong and easy to work with. Cord from sinew starts with proper butchering. An awl is the tool to use when splitting and processing meat and sinews. 

Store the sinew dry; then when you need them, soak the appropriate amount of strands in water or under the tongue for rehydration. 

Wet the remaining meat to more easily remover it; gently bite the strip and slide it through your teeth to clean the strands and ready them for use.

Reconstitute time shouldn't be longer than a day.

  

A bone or metal awl or will further split tendon into manigable stands. Its best to focus on long sources of sinew: the shoulder muscle, the back, inner spine, and the long leg tendons while butchering, unless you really need the sinew for some reason. 

Cut away tangles, bunches and knots at the tips and cook these for a broth and to add nutritious flavour to slow cook soups. 

For cord making, avoid strips that are short.

The long blackstrap sinew and huge, properly harvested leg sinews are good, but I started by using relativly horrid jerky strands which meant short poorly harvested bits from sloppy or hasty made died meat.

Shoulder sinew found on the "big" side of the shoulder blade bone, are straight split able strands.

To safely remover blackstrap sinew remove the blackstrap starting at the neck base and move to the hip bone along the spine. Put the cut, sinew down, on the cutting surface and carful segment the whole cut two  or three times, or however many needed, down to the sinew without cutting it. Pull away the meat with your hand carefully; alternatively, simply slice jerky meat sideways, making long strips until you reach the sinew bottom. When wet, remove  extra meat by scraping carefully with the back of a knife. Dehydrate the sinew strap with whatever little meat is still on. Also, you can find long sinew strands between the spine bones and the large back muscle.

Leg sinew is harvested whole. Removing the lower meatless leg tendon and upper, what would be "calf" muscle sections as one. The blade comes in minimally to cut where the sinews join at the foot, the sides of one another, and where they attach directly to the ends of the bone. An awl or back of a knife can start a separation of the muscless, brute strength pulling appart with shoulders, followed by scraping the meat off the area of sinew holding the muscle - of course saving the meat for drying and tiny bits for the birds or ground; this process can take on many variations, but it must be done without touching the meat too much as if it is later dried, touching will cause bacteria to spread. If the muscle packets are thin enough, just hang it with the sinew and process later as time can be important. The easiest way is to just get the sinews off with the muscle and dried (if drying the meat) and process the sinews later. Sometimes its easer to cut where the long leg tendon meets the muscle meat, in which case you would lose a few inches.

With an awl, when you find a sinew bundle is too thick, poke it midway in the length of the bundle, and pull down creating a separation hole which is just big enough to fit fingers through; then with those fingers pull the two sides apart until the sinew bundle has split lengwise.

DONT EVER hammer the tendon to separate them while dry (or wet) as this damages the integrity of strands and can also cut them - soak, then split.

Sinew, reconstituted, from a moose leg. Using a awl to separate, then split.

The usable strands are bellow, the scrappy pieces that tear away and are too short for a cord are bunched above; the later will be cooked for nutrition.

This is removed and dried deer leg sinew. An even better approach is to split it even further while butchering by inserting the awl and tearing apart. Remember, the "heel" (the joint that connects the muscleles lower leg with the first bone with muscles on the hind legs) wont split - its a tangled jumble of sinew at that point.
The hind leg of a bull moose can yield a complete strand around 36" long.

The red meat is carfully scraped off the sinews and dried; this is a difficult task as its time consuming; in certain climates prolonged warmth is detrimental to meat quality. Harvesting sinew is a difficult task; you must know how much you need and how to harvest it as quickly as you can as you have other meat to dry/cut and must harvest the sinew without touching the meat much.

If you are drying the meat, and are in a hurry,  hang like this. The full hind leg tendon complex has been cleaned of the red meat and my be dried and then rehydrated later when you have time to clean it up and separate the longer strands.The red meat was scraped off by separating the packets first.

This is how properly harvested leg sinew looks - note the curve portion about 2/3rds the way down - this is the "heel" portion and can not be split with an awl or followed the full cord through.