I am almost ready to degrease a couple of pig skulls and then bleach them with peroxide 40%. Both skulls have large teeth and I was thinking the people will probably want the teeth to retain their antique look, but I don't want to paint anything extra on it just to put that aged look back on. Do you guys usually preserve the "aged look" of the boar's teeth or just clean and whiten everything? If I want to keep the antique look on the teeth, how do I keep the super solvent and peroxide from whitening the teeth? Any suggestions would help as I am not used to doing pigs, just bear, deer, and sheep.
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The teeth should be able to be pulled out of the skull easily. Afterall they are hollow and have tissue in them which needs to come out. I'd wait with the bleaching till I could pull out the tusks.
Should I worry about the teeth splintering and chipping? I know that the cutter teeth often break. Is it as easy as glueing them together if they splinter?
After cleaning the skull, I remove the tusk carefully. Usually they pull out quite easy. I then rinse the inside out with clean water. Then i let them dry for a couple of days. After that I fill the tusks with Elmer's glue. the Elmer's glue will dry hard and clear inside the tusks and gives them stability. I never had a tusk splinter on me this way. If you have problems with tusks splintering on you how do you clean your skulls? Do you boil them? If you do then this is your cause of the tusks splintering. Don't ever subject teeth to heat or they will crack on you sooner or later. Yes you can glue them back togehter and afterwards fill them with Elmer's glue to make them more solid. Then reeinstall them into the jaws. Hope this helped.
Thanks for the great advice! I don't boil them so the glue inside should help a lot. I have used it before to glue buffalo and sheep horns back on, but I never thought of filling them with it. Thanks again.