European Mount Pricing

$125 on deer, bear are based on skull size. 175-250 on black bear.

 

I get $225 for a whitetail euro on a plaque

 

My price is for a hanger only. Plaques start at $30 and up depending on what the customer wants.

 

$250 for deer $300 on bears moose and elk $750. clean and whiten only.

 

#1 is to reduce your costs and time as much as possible. Time is money as well as electricity. I don't know how you clean your skulls but, if you macerate them, you should be turning out high quality specimens. Maceration involves very little time and effort other than the preliminary cleaning the extra flesh off the heads. There is heat involved and containers MUST be insulated somehow to cut down on heat loss/energy consumption. Even degreasing will involve heat. Insulate those containers too. Consider ever bit of heat lost is costing you money. Don't waste materials by dumping degreasing solutions too early. Keep peroxide for many other multiple uses and make sure you are not using too much detergent for degreasing.

 

Very good point

 

Powerwashing seems to be fine, until this happens:

Bad Bear by Sea Wolf posted Jun 4, 2018 at 2:29 PM

Simmering ends up cooking the bone and breaking down the chemical parts of the bone that hold it together. After a few years (or less) it will start to go to powder and get chalky. That degradation isn't from peroxide use, it's from the simple act of simmering. I simmered for a while. Quit doing it when I had a few damaged ones. Simmering with soda gets a faster removal of tissue but also a rapid destruction of bone. I work with too many things that cost someone some serious money so I turned to maceration. Been doing it for years now and it turns out solid and undamaged specimens. Stuff you want in the house, not nailed to an outside or garage wall. Yeah, there is some bad odor but it isn't 24/7 and only when you are working with the containers. If you set up right, the odor is contained. If you are working with occasional things, the process only takes about 2 weeks to finish and it's easy to hide a single bucket or two. Someone on here (Joey?) said it was the "smell of money". Of any of the cleaning processes, it is the least involved of any of them. They clean themselves and your time is freed up to do something else.

 

I've cleaned skulls just about every way discussed, including hanging them in a tree inside a sealed bucket with a couple small holes in the bucket. By far the best method to me is maceration, it always works, when I don't need it any more I can just clean my "Rot tank", as we call it and wait til next year, unlike them damn tempermental bugs, or dealing with mites or ham beetles and I can even throw a mummified skull in and it will come out clean, no worries of contaminating a colony with critters. No damaged bone from overheating from simmering. I Live in town and I use a nonworking chest freezer with a tote inside that fits about 5 or 6 skulls depending on what they are. That is heated to about 90 to 94 degrees with a bucket heater on a thermostat. I don't drain off any water unless or until I need to look for teeth in the bottom but have come up with ways to help avoid that.

 

Yes it goes away during the degreasing and whitening and ultimately the drying, I get a premium price, for my area, and get plenty to do, do you think I would still get them if they stink? In a way I'm competing with people that won't charge half of what I charge. I rinse them out with a garden hose making sure to be gentle on the nasal bones and into the degreasing they go. The whole dam process has an odor, no matter how you do it, wet bone stinks, but once dry that odor dissipates to be undetectable for most humans and then once it is sealed pretty much gone.

 

There’s a guy here that can do 18 in a day. I heard he charges $100

 

After maceration, done correctly, there isn't anything left but cleaned bone. Look at the photos I have put up in the Tutorials section. Nasals are completely clean with nothing to blow out at all. It is all eaten away by the bacteria. If anything, there might be one, long piece of cartilage near the bottom in the nasal cavity that easily pulls out in one piece on a finished specimen. It's clean enough to eat off of when done and whitened. Clean, white, sterile bone with no odor at all. Once you have removed it from maceration and rinsed it off, even at that point there is little odor. No smell from degreasing as I have several buckets in the house on the floor right now.

 

18 in a day would be boiled and full of grease. Will look like absolute crap within a year or two (or sooner) once the grease comes to the surface, yellows and starts growing mold.

 

Boiled, power washed and then peroxide

 

That is one of the nice things about maceration. Set it and forget it. Can't be much more efficient than that. To crank out that many skulls, they will be of very low grade. Something you will hang on the garage wall. What you turn out with maceration will be the quality of a museum piece. Bugs too but you have to babysit the bugs even if you have no work for them to do. I use bugs too but limit their work to small delicate things and ligament mounts.

Nasals in a macerated cougar.