Skinning

Deer

Skinning, Salting, Fleshing, Tanning, Shaving, Rehydrating, Mounting, Finishing, Base/Habitat

Supply Links, Graduate Web-Sites, Job Opportunities

Taxidermy Reporting Forms, Federal Duck Labels

Antler Scoring Sheets, Scoring Instructions

Miscellaneous

Send your fleshed and salted capes and hides to a Tannery. This is our best advice when you are starting out. Give yourself time to get the taxidermy part of this business down pat. Give yourself time to learn the rhythms of the seasons and the cash-flow aspect and work through your mounting technique, developing your own style that will allow you to produce work in a practical time-frame and still give your customer a work of art. You can make more customers happy and make more money spending your time on taxidermy work instead of tanning. Tanning by commercial tanneries is not very expensive (deer capes generally run $23-$40), and for the amount of time you'll have wrapped up in struggling through the tanning process, you could have been putting together someone's mount, and you could have ended your day with a lot more progress toward a finished piece that a customer will come in and pay you for.

Commercial tanneries do this for a living. They have a lot more of the kinks worked out than we will ever hope to. We do run into problems with tanneries, delayed capes, lost or damaged capes, etc, but when your tannery delivers you an on-schedule shipment of capes or hides, their product is so consistent that that variable (wondering about the condition of the cape) is eliminated from our life, and things mount smoothly and ...consistently... Any time you can get an assembly line going, and tanneries help with this because the batches they send back are going to have similar rehydrating characteristics and similar stretch and thinness, and you can count on all your capes mounting in a similar manner and reacting in a similar manner, you can gain speed and quality.

That having been said, (and we did have to say it), there is a time and a place for in-shop tanning. We use an auto-tanner for deer capes. We like the auto-tanner, because it is the easiest, surest way to get a consistent tan in inconsistent weather and in a busy shop where we don't have the room or the leisure for open vats to soak tans until they're done.

The auto-tanner will give you a wet tan that is very suitable for deer capes. Because of the nature of the tan, the cape will dry "hard". The auto-tanner will not produce, on it's own, the leather-backed fur that you can drape over the back of the couch for a throw. The auto-tanner will produce, in timely fashion, a cape very suitable for immediate mounting or freezing, and that is what most of our shop work is. For rugs or for throws, a commercial tannery will always be your best best for a supple hair-on leather with nice drape. You can make a reasonable facsimile of this in your own shop, but it will be at the expense of a great deal of time and effort, which, we've already established, might be better spent getting something mounted, and getting paid. If a customer wants a rug or a throw, flesh the piece, salt it, send it, call the customer when it gets back, and get paid. We don't encourage you to spend weeks on that one piece coming up with an ingenious method for doing what the tannery already does so well. (Unless you are bored out of your mind, and have way too much money, and you don't ever have to think about what you're going to pay the electric bill with.)

To Auto-Tan: We have the 16 gallon size. We like to tan 3 deer capes at a time. (The auto-tanner manufacturer suggests that 5 capes would work, but we feel that the handling time for 5 capes is too long to have them all in limbo.) To tan, we put in our freshly fleshed capes (no salting necessary if they go directly from "fleshed" to "auto-tanner"), and 1 gallon of water, 1 pound of Arrowhead Tanning Crystals, and 1 capful of Basacryl for each cape. (For 3 capes, we use 3 gallons of water, 3 pounds of Arrowhead Tanning Crystals, and 3 capfuls of Basacryl.) (I know that seems easy to figure, but I didn't want there to be any misunderstanding about the ratios.)

Close everything up. Tighten everything down. Pressurize tank to 50 psi, and process for 2 hours.

At the end of 2 hours, take the capes out, and drape them over the bicycle racks you have hanging over your sinks. (Do not drain your auto-tanner. Keep the soup leftover from the first stage in the auto tanner. Do not drain your auto-tanner.) Let the capes drip until you get to them to shave them.

To shave the capes, sit behind the shaving wheel, with the back of it to your chest, and your arms reaching around it. Grasp the cape in two hands and pull it from left to right against the spinning blade. Never operate your blade without the guards in place. Stop every so often to sharpen your blade (which means to adjust the angle that the blade is rolled over). You shouldn't have to lean into the shaving part. If everything's adjusted right, touching the the cape to the blade will cut it, and moving it from left to right will zing it off in a strip. We prefer to not shave the faces with the wheel, but we do thin the faces with a skinning knife at the desk. You're shooting for 1/16 to 1/8 of an inch left on the cape, and whatever depth it is, it should be uniform all over the cape. (If it is thick up on the neck seam, it will be hard to sew later. If it is too thin, the thread will cut it when you pull it through. Just a few more things to worry about while you're learning how to do this.)

When all capes are shaved, place the capes back into the auto-tanner, in the same soup you pulled them out of, adding 1/2 cup of tanning oil per cape. (1 1/2 cups for 3 capes.) Process for another 2 hours at 50 psi.

After the 2 hours, pull them out and place them in heavy bags, labeled with customer number and name, and freeze them, or mount immediately.

To Tan The Traditional Way: Consult a good book. We recommend Breakthrough Mammal Taxidermy Manual, written by Ken Edwards. Breakthrough Magazine also ran an extensive article section on Tanning in Issues # 49-56. These two recommendations cover techniques, chemicals, equipment, etc. You will learn enough to be completely intimidated. And after all that reading, you're going to just have to haul off and try some of the ideas, working with the solutions and chemicals until you find a combination that works consistently.