Seems to be alot of sheep hunters here...I am doing a European skull mount on a small ram how do you remove the horns properly clean then re-atach?

Something I've never done, but read about:

Put the whole thing inside a plastic bag, tightly closed, and let it sit for a few days. After that they should come off relatively easily, maybe some tapping with a rubber or wooden mallet is required. Some advise to cut the top off the bony insides, and maybe even drill through them so nothing bloody/gooey/messy stays inside and starts stinking up your house.

Frans

My taxidermist does like Frans describes, and just turns them upside down and bangs them on the concrete floor to "pop" them loose....sometimes quite strenuously!!!

I recommend you boil the skull/cores, clean the inside of the horns and then apply Borax to disinfect.

My taxidermist uses regular automotive bondo to glue the horns back on the cores.

Cheers,
Canuck

Thanks All...I will start on him this weekend.

Ted,

Use the Borax as Canuck suggested and then insert one or two mothballs into each horn before reattaching them. I usually just use silicone for the latter since it's easy to work with.

This a set of Merino sheep horns (from Santa Cruz Island) that I did. I made the wooden base on my lathe, formed a base for the skull plate out of plaster of Paris and covered it with tanned buckskin. I have another one from New Zealand to get done. Then I might make a set of table lamps out of them. -TONY

The plastic bag method will work eventually, but is plain rotten!

Boil the head, making sure the bases of the horns are underwater, you may need a big pot but after a few hours the horns will come away.
Once you slip them off, let the horns boil for a short while longer, to soften up the slimey glue that holds them on which you can scrub out with one of those long bottle brushes.

Scrub the inside with detergent, amonia, alcohol - whatever you please to get the stink out, then give them a cleaning up outside and let them dry.

You can cut about 2/3 of the horn stems off the skull to make slipping them on and off easier if you ever need to transport the head in pieces or leave them intact.

I like to buff up the horns with a bit of beeswax applied with a shoepolish brush to enrich the colours of the horns, or mix up some shoe polish to the right colour. The shoe polish can give great results, but be careful! Horns are not "black" or "brown"! Start with a pale colour then det darker if need be or only in the highlights.

Bleach the skull with concentrated hydrogen peroxide and a little amonia, cut to the desired line and you're done.

Easy, once you see it being done.

quote:

Boil the head, making sure the bases of the horns are underwater, you may need a big pot but after a few hours the horns will come away.
Once you slip them off, let the horns boil for a short while longer, to soften up the slimey glue that holds them on which you can scrub out with one of those long bottle brushes.

I wouldn't boil the horns while on the head. I've done several bighorn sheep skulls, and this is a great way to screw up the horns.

Try the bag trick to get the horns to come off, the smell can be fixed easily with a little dish soap, boil the skull cap and mount away.

MG

I don't know if for some reason your bighorns are different to other sheep but I've boiled out a half dozen or so mouflon sheep and never had a problem. Maybe overcooking them was the problem?

Well for one, a bighorn sheep in these parts is usually a trophy of a life time and most folks are not too keen on lopping off the horns at the skull. If I do boil a sheep, it is for a european mount, and generally don't have the luxury of cutting the skull into little bits to boil the whole skull. The bag trick works, becuase there is no way you can damage the horn and the smell is removed easily. There is also no discoloration (even taxidermists here don't color sheep horns). After you're done finishing up the skull, use a little epoxy and bond the horns back to the bone....you're in business.

MG

Fair enough Madgoat, but I think there might be some misunderstanding here.

You don't cut the skull into pieces to boil it, the only cutting you may do is aesthetical and is the last step of the trophy preparation. If you chose to cut the inner core of the horns, you leave a good 10 or more inches so the horns can be mounted propery afterwards. Doing this only makes sense if you intent of transporting a large trophy so you can dismantle it. For instance some African antelope like kudu can be done this way to make shipping easier.
Usually the skull would be cut on a diagonal line that should take off about the bottom 1/3 of the eye sockets, the teeth and a little portion of the nose. This is done so the skull can be mounted flat and flush onto a plaque.
With sheep (mouflon) it is not always done since you can't mount it directly to a plaque because the horns get in the way. Here in Europe they use a small pedistal to give the horns clearance and mount that to the plaque.

Also, boiling does not discolour the horns. I have touched up some old horns from picked up heads that have been sun bleached and gotten great results, but it is a tricky operation, a bit like a taxidermist using an airbrush on fish and game heads to renew the colour of the nose, eyelids or lips.

Personally, I wouldn't have any reservations about boiling and preparing a bighorn head myself if I wanted a euopean mount, although I rekon that a shoulder mount is the way to go with those beautiful sheep.

Each to his own, I have tried the bag trick to extract boar tusks when I was camped out in the desert and didn't have water to waste and I can say I'm not keen to try it again, hence my preference to boil out heads.

Like I said, each to his own. It's a nice problem to have.

I have never boiled out a mouflon, so I have no idea if it has any affect on the outcome of horn color. In my experience, bighorn sheep horns will change color if they are boiled.

Cutting off the top 1/3 of the skull and boiling only that portion is not an option, at least with the folks whose heads I've boiled out. They want to preserve the complete skull for display.

Like you said, each to his own. I prefer the bag trick, then boil out the skull and leave the horns alone. In my experience in dealing with a pile of horned animals for european mounts, it has worked the best for me.

MG

quote:

In my experience, bighorn sheep horns will change color if they are boiled.

I have no experience with the above, but the boiling sure ruined the horns of an Arawapa ram I killed in NZ. They not only shrunk but also discolored from the FAT that permeates the water. Unlike the ones I posted earlier in this thread, they wound up nearly black.

So before I start to work on them, I'm going to soak them in a degreaser and might even have to do some light bleaching.

BTW, the boiling also had a detrimental effect on my blue and black wildebeest horns. It removed much of the "smoothness" they had, leaving many rough spots and cracks. -TONY