My husband and I received our first deer of the season to mount and it is the first time we have ever done a deer with full velvet on the antlers. We are researched you web site and purchased the Preservzit and Blood eater chemicals. I have read the forums that I could find about using these products, but I cannot find the one that told me how to use these two products. I thought instructions would have come with the bottles but it did not. We want to use the soaking method. Can someone tell me what the mixture is you use? Thanks
Brenda
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Email Bruce for the instructions.
I can tell you right now, that if the antlers are hard, you won't be able to inject any preservz it at this point. What you do is take good strong papertowels, soak them in preservz it (I use it full strength but it can be diluted with water) and wrap the antlers with the dripping wet papertowels tightly. Once the whole antler is wrapped take some plastic strips (or bags, whatever you have handy) and wrap those over the papertowels to keep them from drying out too quick. Do this for each antler. Leave it like that for about three days, then unwrap it and hang the antlers to dry. The velvet should be just fine at this point. Make sure you don't store the antlers in a damp place as this would rehydrate the velvet (like it would a hide).
Once the velvet is dry you can go ahead and mount up your deer.
It is quite possible that the velvet may be flaky after treatment. This has nothing to do with the way you treated them, it just means that the velvet had already deteriorated past the point of proper preservation. This happens every now and then with hard velvet. Just tell the customer not to handle the velvet and it will be fine.
Hope this helped.
If the velvet is fresh, I would suggest the injection method. You can use either formaldehyde, or any of the antler preservatives on the market which are safer than formaldehyde. For our example we use formaldehyde, but the method is the same. Before you inject the antlers, prick small holes into the tip of each tine using a small pin and then several holes at the base of the antlers. Then start to inject the formaldehyde into the tip of the antler. The formaldehyde will fill up the antlers and push out the blood at the base of the them. Once the solution coming out of the base of the antlers is clear, all blood has been removed from the antlers and you can stop injecting them.
If the velvet is already on the dry side, wrap it in rags which were soaked in the formaldehyde. Make sure the rags are dripping wet. Then wrap the antlers with plastic to keep the rags from drying out too fast. Leave that on for approximately three days. Unwrap the antlers and let them dry.
Thanks Rick at http://www.whitetailsunlimitedtaxidermy.com/
I personally feel that freeze drying is the best bet for velvet antlers
DaveT
Thank ya'll for the help. The deer was brought to us within just a few hours of being killed. We put the antler in the freezer until we could figure out how to do this. Do I need to keep the antlers out of the freezer for a while before wrapping them in the soaked paper towels? Thanks again for your help.