I've been skinning my tiniest critters under gloved "protection" for the past week. Have done 6.
This "protection" is a mixture of Van Dyke's tanning crystals to set hair, Stop-Rot to kill germs, oxalic acid to get the skin to pickle up a little, and degreaser to degrease. The pH of this solution is about 3 to 3.5. There is no salt in it.
I just toss the whole critter in the tray, and skin it with the skin "under water" the whole time. I also do all fleshing with this stuff "exposed" to the skin. The skin is exposed to this solution for about an hour total.
The results seem to be quite comparable to what Krowtann seems to be about. The skins come out fully whitened, degreased, 0-blood, and all hair-set.
The "tan" (Van Dyke's stuff) washes right out too, which is good, so then I can apply EZ-100 and oil and have a nice, stretchy, white leather skin, which won't dry rot.
Haven't had one slip yet and these are 10-12 gram, wild-caught, trapped mammals.
It also works on birds, as I tanned a couple of birds just after preparing the meat for the table. Pretty strange, and neat, to have a white, stretchy, fine bird feathered-leather skin.
I've been re-using it for over a week because it's not a tan and I'm only using it to keep it from slipping hair during skinning.
You may want to try this concoction if Krowtann confuses you, or if you run out of Krowtann.
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To just skin the critter and then just plain old tan it? Why go thru what your doing? Skin it, salt it, tan it and be done with it. Why make things more complicated for no reason?
We're talking about something that takes 2 hours from dead animal to tanned and finished. vs. waiting a 72+ hrs. for the salt to dry and then going through all the steps -- rehydration, then immersion tan.
(I'm sure it would take longer to tan thicker skins, such as squirrel or bobcat, but if you read the post, you can see that this was tested on thin-skinned animals.)
By tossing the whole dead animal right from the trap in to the solution, prior to skinning, you also avoid the need to use a smelly, toxic pesticide - the solution does a dandy job of killing ticks, mites, fleas, and lice, and the pH inactivates worm eggs and fungi.
On a personal-use skin, like most of these Krowtann people are talking about, it really does save time.
Heck, the best way for people to do things is to send them all out for pro-tanning but that's both costly and extremely time consuming. Some people simply don't listen to that recommendation.
For the people that prefer to skin their animals and then toss them in to Krowtann, and mount "same day", this might be a good alternative method to try (if they are out of it or if they are cheap, and judging from a lot of the posts, this is most!) -- just trying to help.
Try it on your next toss-out skin, just for kicks, you may be surprised.
I've never used Krowtann, only read about it, and I'm sure these 2 things work similarly, so there's no bias there.
I thought that salt was a key part in a pickle? the acids keep the ph in turn killing bacteria? I may not know but your solution has no salt, but I think if not mistaking that krowtan does use salt?