"Get the FAT Out"

Borax or salt??

I have a nice bird skin I bought that has quite a bit of fat still lingering that I am having trouble scraping without damaging the skin. I tried Borax but it doesn't seem to help much. Would salt work better or is there another trick I should try?

By the way most of the fat is in the vicinity of the wing joints. Would removing the wings help?

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

I found that for myself anyway, cutting the wings free from the rest of the skin makes it easier work your knife into the area. Also, opening the skin around the joint a bit helps too. In the end, it is pretty hard to get it all free. Depending on what species you are dealing with it might serve best to cut the primaries off and bundle the matched sets together, pluck any other feathers you want, then process clean and debug them off the wing.

Borax. Scrape away what fat you can and then a couple applications of borax

Just adding my .2 .... If you have a fairly thick layer of fat, borax, or salt just isn't going to cut it, while the surface may dry out completely, plucking feathers or any flexing is going to end in a smelly greasy mess.... This I know from first hand experience, salt and Borax simply aren't a substitute for removing the fat....

Possibly one of the members here may have an idea other than scraping to deal with fat, if not, try a call to your local taxidermist and ask them what they do, they may have some wonder chemical.

Here is a novel idea. Ronn Lucas has suggested soaking fatty duck skins in lacquer thinner. You can find his post by searching the board for 'lacquer thinner'. I tried this once with a duck skin and is seemed to work fairly well. You have to be careful with the container you use for this. Lacquer thinner will eat through most plastics in time. I ended up tossing that particular skin though because I let it get too rotten before I started processing it. The thinner couldn't get rid of the stench of death. So I'm not sure how it would have ultimately turned out.

I was about to suggest alcohol. Borax dries things out, but you need a solvent that actually dissolves and removes the fat. That means an organic solvent that will dissolve oil.

Ed