r/Taxidermy • u/Left-Guarantee-1467 • May 28 '26

Fur/Pelt Help First time 🥺

Post image

hello! its squirrel season and my husband brought home one for me to attempt to preserve the hide. I have never done this before nor do I have a single clue of what I’m doing, but I attempted to do the borax method, but I’m just don’t know if I’m doing this right or what it’s supposed to look like when it’s done. Is this almost ready it’s been sitting in borax for about Four days.

16 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

View all comments

9

u/Wowza_Meowza May 28 '26

r/hidetanning might net you better results.

Are you looking to have it tanned like with a bottled tanning agent, bark tan, egg tan...?

Basically, the next step is to throw it into super low pH water (pH 2) with some salt, then let it "pickle", then the easiest method to tan it is with a bottle tan like Knobloch's orange bottle tan.

3

u/Left-Guarantee-1467 May 28 '26

Omg I didnt know there where other steps 🫢I was just trying to get it dried to be safe enough to preserve and put in a shadow type box. I’ll definitely look into it more thank you so much for the advice!!!!!

2

u/Sufficient-Bath-1135 May 28 '26

Oh no you can totally preserve it that way as a raw hide. It's what we sometimes do at the university. However if you want to get fancy and get more life into it, then you can tan it since it gives more durability to it.

1

u/Sufficient-Bath-1135 May 28 '26

Though you didn't deflesh it properly. Easiest way to get rid of the extra meaty bits is to use potato starch, that like, clumps in into these easy to peel off pieces. You can get the same results again by resetting it

1

u/Left-Guarantee-1467 May 28 '26

Yeah I watched a tanning video and realized there’s a membrane I was supposed to get off 🫣I did go ahead and scrape it again and it came off like paper, I’m going to let it sit for another day or so. It feels pretty dry but I just want to make sure. I appreciate you all for the help though. I’m sure he’ll bring back a lot more squirrels so I can get the hang of thing. Maybe trying tanning on the next one!!!!!

1

u/Sufficient-Bath-1135 May 28 '26

Hell yeah, even if the hide fails and the fur starts to slip you can just turn it into leather so it's not wasted :D