Bleaching skulls
#11
Fork Horn
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location:
Posts: 264

How do you get the brain and stuff out of the head? I was thinking about doing a Euro mount myself and had a friend that soaked his in a water / borax soap mixture that was just below the boiling point. He said everything just came out by being liquified and it bleached the scull at the same time...
#12
Typical Buck
Join Date: Nov 2005
Location: Wall NJ
Posts: 705

I put a small bend in a heavy wire, insert it in the opening at the back of the skulland swirl it around under running water, stoping every once and a while to shake out the brain matter. It works great.
#13
#14
Join Date: Sep 2007
Location:
Posts: 22

Hell, we get $150 for a horn panel and $250 for a European mount. And you can't stop them from coming in! I'll have to agree with Timberland, we are far from "out of control". It can be a very meticulous process and believe it or not, very time consuming also! I know a lot of you like to do this yourselves but when you are doing this as a business $250 makes a fair buck on that project. By the time we send them off to have the bettles do their thing, get them back, paid for shipping both ways, seal them and mount them on a panel. You will be lucky to have a little over an hours worth of shop time.
#15

I'm in the process of cleaning my whitetail skull but I had my mule deer and antelope skulls cleaned for me by a fellow out of Wyoming. He charged $65 each and had them done in less than a week. Not sure how exactly he does it but he had well over 100 skulls in pots of one sort or another from some monster elk to longhorn cows and even a giraffe! If I was local to him I would just pay the $65 instead of messing with it. I can't imagine paying $250 to have a skull cleaned. Around here you can get a nice shoulder mount for $450.
Here's the skulls that I had cleaned.


Here's the skulls that I had cleaned.


#16
Fork Horn
Join Date: Sep 2006
Posts: 177

Mix sodium carbonate with the boiling water and the meat will come off easier,just don't let it boil to long.Then I use magnesium carbonate and mix it with hyd. peroxide to make a paste,paint on skull leave overnite and brush off.This is the same stuff that comes in the kits and can be ordered from vandykes taxidermy