In reading allot of your posts it appears as though you dislike Krowtann. I have used it on over 100 mounts and can't find anything that i don't like about it. i know you have allot more exp than i do and i can tell in your posts that you have allot of good advice to offer. Why is it that you don't care for the stuff?
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I'm going to paraphrase my buddy Bill Yox. We were talking about another product, the AutoTanner, and Bill's remark was, "Well, I for one don't believe you can just take all the ingredients required to make a cake and throw them in the oven and expect them to come out a cake."
Krowtann is just a reinvention of a wheel I used when I started doing taxidermy nearly 50 years ago. It's a alum tan and it smells strongly of sulfuric acid. Though it worked then (and much longer before) all one needs to do is look at museums to see what eventually happens to alum tans. Bruce Rittel spelled it out and was ridiculed when he talked about how a normal chemical reaction of the alum would break down during humid periods and leave sulfuric acid in the leather. Need I remind any of you what improper neutralizing does? What if your tan actually produced more acid AFTER you'd neutralized it?
I also hear about the wonderful stretch. Absolutely. It stretches inbelievably and has a beautiful white color to the leather. Let it dry though. You'll see that alum does to skin what it would do to you if you tasted it. It shrinks unbelievably as well and such brittleness only leads to cracking down the road.
As for me, I'd rather DP a mount than use an alum tan. But THAT'S MY OPINION. I maintain that the proof of my statements still lies 15 to 20 years down the road. I saw it during my lifetime and I'll be greatly surprised if some of you don't see it again during yours.
What you say makes sense. The oldest mounts i have that i mounted are about 6 years old and on those i used Curatan. They still look as good as they did then ( pretty awful). I have used Lutan,Liqua tan, McKenzie tan and Krowtann. I may well regret using Krowtann in the future, around here nobody wants a DP mount but i know some guys that do a couple hundred a year using it and have been for years with out many complaints. The winner of the professional division at the OAT show last year was DP mount as well.
I see so many older pieces of luggage, etc, where the zippers and/or stitching has disintegrated?
Always was curious about that...
Bill, In time, the oils leach out of leather and, given enough time and humidity switches, it will rot like any other protein material. To bacteria and molds and fungi, leather is food. Unless leather is constantly treated with nurturing agents, it is eaten, dries out and blows away...LOL
I am with George on this "Modern" crap. Sure, it works well in the short haul, but when you leave out steps in any process that is 5000 years old, you kinda wonder why others were not that smart. I'll tell you, our ancestors were THAT smart.......Every so many years, somebody comes up with a "wonderful,NEW" process. In ten years or less, it is proven to be a re-invention of another "NEW" process and we all go back to pulverizing oak bark and our acids and bases because they WORK! Year after year, generation after generation, they WORK!
The world leather industry is a magnum sized, multi-billion dollar a year business. To spite the folks at BASF, DUPONT, and other chemistry giants, good leather still takes time and intense effort to produce. If there was a miracle tanning process around, it would be in use world wide.
I may just try this Krowtan stuff and subject the leather to the cur stress test here in the swamp and see what happens to it...THEN we'll know. But I betcha the mount will be covered with hoar-frost inside two weeks.
if i would have bought $5,000 worth of harly davidson stock in 1980 i would be a millionare 7 times over today
Most of the people who are criticizing Krowtann have never even used it. I have used it and it worked better for me than anything else I have ever used. I am not a chemist but I do carry out all of the R&D on every new product sent for WASCO to sample. Most of the products I test do exactly what they are supposed to. Once in a while there are some duds but you can bet the farm that Krowtann works. I have experimented with many variants to the formula and all of them worked also but not with results as good as the ingredients in Krowtann. Krowtann will pass any stress test Cur can administer just as well as anything else he uses. I do agree with him that given enough time and lack of attention, everything organic thing you have ever seen will eventually disintegrate.
Send me some to test.....LOL I'll try anything once. You noticed that I qualified my statement by citing the fact that I had never used it.
that Sinclair Clark gave me had been laying around my shop all those years. I soaked it in plain water figuring it would fall apart and forgot about it for two whole days. Finally,I rung it out and it retained itself 100%. It prepped and shaved well enough to mount. Using an altered paper cougar rug shell form by Joe Jonas Jr., I made a semi shoulder mount of it about a week later with out freezing or refrigerating the scalp. This was witnessed by Mike Brigante of NY. Sinclair and his mentor Dominick Villa of the Clark Studios never used acid in any form for tanning. They used potassium alum which was more expensive but was always used by Sinclair in The American Museum of Natural History,The Clark Studios, and Jonas Bros.of NY. Steve Horn would think nothing of putting a 20 year old tanned cape in an arsenic soak over night to be mounted the next day. His staff of taxidermists were like magicians back then as they would even re-soak bear skin rugs and turn them into full mounts. Even to this day,I have never lost a single skin that was tanned with Sinclairs formulas or even an inch of stretch for that matter. I guess 'if it works for you' is the frame of mind needed to get the job done.
SOak or paint on?
Lets see, which has the time to soak into the hide, darn sure not a paint on.
I have used both the Auto-tanner and Krowtann and they are the best on the market.
I have switched to Krowtann for all the small mammals. WHY, Its better.
I try to like George but he dont know anything about Krowtann, he loves to say "It don't Work."
As mentioned, why do we keep going back to the basics?
IT WORKS!
I have several skins that have been ALUM TANNED and layed around for years, they are good now as they were when first tanned. They have sat in the shed in the summer, winter been places you should never put a skin tanned with anything and they are still good.
Any slippage incurred with Krowtann would have slipped with any other tan WORSE, I mean KROWTAN works and its easy.
No Duh! Its not like throwing everything together and hoping for a cake, you have to follow the steps and READ THE DIRECTIONS FIRST.
Like any tan YOU THE CONSUMER CAN SCREW IT UP!