Has anyone used stop rot on velvet? I usually freeze dry all of the velvet antlers I take in, but last august my cousin and I shot caribou in Alaska. I preserved the antlers in the field with a tack board and turpentine as I was told (and saw it) worked very well. Both antlers were hardened up, were not bulbous and hardly had any blood in them. My antlers turned out very good, but the other one is starting to stink, but there hasn't been any slippage and the velvet is nice and tight. Would stop rot help me out or am I SOL. If I am then I guess I will be talking to Research Mannikins to get velvet put back on.
Thanks, Glen
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There's a possibility the STOP-ROT treatment of stinky velvet "might" work. The use of turpentine will have changed the quo. There's one way to find out.
I would suggest that you cut the STOP-ROT with distilled water for this application. One part STOP-ROT to two parts distilled water. Then brush on with a hair bristle paint brush. If there are areas that the solution doesn't want to "feed or wick" into initially, let it sit for a few, and go back and work those areas again.
If the treatment works, you'll know about as soon as you start the treatment. If the odor disappears, and remains gone after drying, you more than likely are set to go.
Turpentine can be amazingly complex chemically. Being aware of it's known potential effects and results with skin, tissue and insects, I started digging a little deeper just a few years ago.
The best I could make of it, turpentine "could" contain as many as 77 different molecular structures for the formula C10H16 alone. Enter that formula into a Google search and you'll get an idea of complexity real quick. Bear in mind that isn't going to include a myriad of other potential structures.
The presence, or absence of any one compound in a formulation can make all the difference in the world in successes and failures. That is a reason that some things work some times, but not all the time.
In the same light, with your turpentine treatment of the velvet antlers, the treatment could work on one set but not the other because of compound content differences existing in the two different antlers. Ratio of content is another thing that can make the difference between success and failure.
I waded through the structures I mentioned above until I got down to three that had a flat carbon ring structure that could have the ability to "slice". I called up a refiner and obtained two different 500 ml samples, and then chickened out. In my opinion, the health and hazard risks potentials did not look pretty, and out weighed the "value" of consistent performance, so I chucked the whole project.
If you decide the STOP-ROT route, I would appreciate hearing how it worked out, poitive or negative.
thanks. i will order some ant try it out next week. i will let you know how it turns out.
thanks again
Glen Seekins