Skinning the mink
To follow up on the mink story, I thought I'd share the process of salvaging the hide from it. Click on the links to see pictures and use your browser's back button to return here.
I had kept it in the refrigerator down here in the shop, so it was good and fresh. The first step was to prepare a mink-sized hide stretcher. Jeff only had muskrat sized stretchers, but gave me a copy of a page in an old book that showed the dimensions of what the proper sized stretcher for a mink is. Earl cut one out of the plywood from a musket crate while I ran to town on an errand.
Here it the hide stretcher, ready for action.
To remove the hide, first I used a scalpel to cut around the mink's genitals and anus, so as not to let anything yucky leak out. Then two cuts were made along the inside of either rear leg. The hide then peels off inside out as if you were removing a sweater. The tail is slit the long way and the skin peeled off of it. I cut off the rear feet at the ankle, and removed them later when I could get a better grip on the hide to pull the feet inside out.
I had clipped the little guy's tail to a metal chair that I put on the table to hang the mink at a handy working height. Here you can see it with it's hide halfway off. It isn't as messy as you'd imagine.
It takes some careful knife work, but you can remove the skin from the front legs and leave the paws and claws intact. In this picture, the hide is nearly off.
A bit of careful scalpel work, and the head is skinned out, leaving as much of the face intact as possible. I managed to save one ear and the nose. The other ear was removed by the shotgun blast.
Finally, here is the mink and the inside-out hide, neatly separated.
Notice the fat layer around the rear legs? I trimmed it off to render it down for "mink oil", the stuff that you put on your boots. It is used as a base for skin care products as well.
Interestingly, I only found 2 shotgun pellets in the thing, and a small piece of shot cup. As it turned out, he turned his head to get a better look at me just as I pulled the trigger and was killed by the blast at the muzzle more so than being hit with shot. The blast opened up the side of his head, and I found the pellets under the skin behind his front shoulder. Think of the power that is unleashed at the muzzle the next time you fire a blank at someone!
In the next post, I'll show how the hide gets stretched, scraped, and tanned.
I had kept it in the refrigerator down here in the shop, so it was good and fresh. The first step was to prepare a mink-sized hide stretcher. Jeff only had muskrat sized stretchers, but gave me a copy of a page in an old book that showed the dimensions of what the proper sized stretcher for a mink is. Earl cut one out of the plywood from a musket crate while I ran to town on an errand.
Here it the hide stretcher, ready for action.
To remove the hide, first I used a scalpel to cut around the mink's genitals and anus, so as not to let anything yucky leak out. Then two cuts were made along the inside of either rear leg. The hide then peels off inside out as if you were removing a sweater. The tail is slit the long way and the skin peeled off of it. I cut off the rear feet at the ankle, and removed them later when I could get a better grip on the hide to pull the feet inside out.
I had clipped the little guy's tail to a metal chair that I put on the table to hang the mink at a handy working height. Here you can see it with it's hide halfway off. It isn't as messy as you'd imagine.
It takes some careful knife work, but you can remove the skin from the front legs and leave the paws and claws intact. In this picture, the hide is nearly off.
A bit of careful scalpel work, and the head is skinned out, leaving as much of the face intact as possible. I managed to save one ear and the nose. The other ear was removed by the shotgun blast.
Finally, here is the mink and the inside-out hide, neatly separated.
Notice the fat layer around the rear legs? I trimmed it off to render it down for "mink oil", the stuff that you put on your boots. It is used as a base for skin care products as well.
Interestingly, I only found 2 shotgun pellets in the thing, and a small piece of shot cup. As it turned out, he turned his head to get a better look at me just as I pulled the trigger and was killed by the blast at the muzzle more so than being hit with shot. The blast opened up the side of his head, and I found the pellets under the skin behind his front shoulder. Think of the power that is unleashed at the muzzle the next time you fire a blank at someone!
In the next post, I'll show how the hide gets stretched, scraped, and tanned.
posted by MVTCoPete | 9:45 PM
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