I've actually done a couple racks this way with good results so I don't know what I did wrong. Had a 130 class 8 point full velvet with about 2" of soft tips on beam and g2's & g3's frozen for a month. I thawed it overnight in the fridge and going by the velvet tan instructions pricked the tips and inject each beam until the blood came out of the tips. I coated the rack with velvet tan and hung to dry. Now they stink! It has been a week. It looks like the velvet is drying down o.k. but the smell really bad. Anyone know what I did wrong? Are they wrecked? Will the odor ever go away? What can be done now?
Thanks in advance.
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Antlers with that much soft tissue just cannot be "injected" or "submerged" to make them look like anything but dried prunes. There' too much blood and cartilagenous tissue to ever saturate with any injection. What you smell is rot, plain and simple. The "velvet tan", "velvet cure" potions are just bandaids. They work OK for antlers that are hard underneath the velvet, but I've used ever concoction known to the industry over the years and NONE OF THEM WORK ON SOFT ANTLERS. At least they don't work to where I'd want to charge a customer for them.
The time to save these horns in velvet has passed, if you had had them freeze dried before they smelled you could have saved them. Now the only thing that I would do is to clean them up (the smell will be Bad) scrape off all the velvet and let them dry out in the sun, then epoxy any voids on the rack and flock the rack.They turn out great. The address for a place to buy the flocking and glue, at a good price is www.woodcraft.com I hope that it works out for you.
Rich
I killed an axis deer that had very soft and flexible antlers. I stripped the velvet off and then cut the antlers into sections and proceeded to tap out the core with a drill spade bit, this is neccessary as the core of the antlers are full of a bloody mushy pulp. Then I boiled them clean in sal soda and put the sections back together with pieces of rebar and bondo, they were then ready to ship to Research Mannikins for their magical application of artificial velvet. You can see them on my gallery page at www.BreckDickinsonTaxidermy.com
I think you can salvage your mount if you cut the antlers off and follow my method.
paint and submerg them in alcohol/it might help..