Amateur Taxidermy

[chaos]

So me and the boys have been trying our hand at some european mounts. Have yet to boil down the rather large 6 point the youngest took this season. how do you fellers suggest attaching the skulls to the palques? Dry wall screws? Been working a bit too much to have all this done. Nice spring/summer day......... been over 100 a couple of times.........
http://i151.photobucket.com/albums/s132/colbcheese/boysskulls.jpg
http://i151.photobucket.com/albums/s132/colbcheese/boysskulls2.jpg

[Wayne Smith]

If there is room embed some machine screws in epoxy putty inside the cavity of the skulls. Drill holes and counter drill for the nuts to be surface mounted in the plaque to run the machine screws through and add nuts. Viola, mounted.

[MtGun44]

Man, that one on the left is a nice one. Both skulls look really great, too. The one on
the right musta injured one when it was growing. Still a real decent rack on the other side.

How do you get them so white?

Bill

[oldtoolsniper]

Those look really good! What system was used to clean them?

[chaos]

I stewed, not boiled, them in water and peroxide. Scraped the heck out of them. Packed Borax powdered laundry soap in every crack and crevice each day to help dry up the hard to get stuff. Scrape some more and then dremel the heck out of the final stuff with a wire brush. I then masked the horns off and sprayed them in KILZ. Another coat of flat white and they were done.

Here they are finished and mounted. Got a few more to do......

http://i151.photobucket.com/albums/s132/colbcheese/finishedmounts.jpg
The big buck would have made 16 points, but he broke 3 stickers off. The smaller of the two had been run over by a car, best I can figure, a some point in the distant past. The leg on the opposite side had been broken and had fused back together. His hoof was pointing straight down. My son was not going to take that buck until he saw the limp.

Buck's injured rear leg:
http://i151.photobucket.com/albums/s132/colbcheese/hoof1.jpg

[leadeye]

Nice looking mounts, would have never thought about painting the skulls. It looks like it worked out very well.

[Dennis Eugene]

Nice very nice, I bet the boys enjoyed hunting and helping almost as much as you enjoyed haveing them help. Dennis

[oldtoolsniper]

I used the boiling method on beaver, coyote, skunk, raccoon, possum, mink, and muskrats, it smelled to much like soup and put me off meat for a few days. I got the bright idea to use the air compressor to blow the brains out and blow them out it did, I was covered as was the walls and ceiling in my skinning shed. One beaver has a lot of brains packed in there! I switched to the dermestid beetles as the preferred method. If you have a sally’s beauty supply in your area you can get a gallon of paste hydrogen peroxide used for highlighting and it will bleach the skulls white. It costs about $12 a gallon and is the same thing Van dykes sells in the European skull kits.

[fourarmed]

The last ones I helped with, we boiled them, then power-washed all the tissue out. Quick and easy compared to picking it out by hand, but I'll bet the owner of the car wash wonders what the smell is come spring.