How long will skins keep - frozen?

[LanceS4803]

I have a couple of deer hides (green) that I froze year before last, and a coyote from last year.
They were cleaned, folded and placed in plastic bags.

I just haven't gotten around to tanning the deer hides, either with or without hair.
Are they still good? How to tell?

 

[bigtex]

They will freezer burn in time. Length of time depends on how well they are sealed.
When I was doing taxidermy it always pissed me off when someone would bring in a deer head that they claimed was killed recently. It doesn't take long to find out that it's been in the freezer for over a year.
The ears are the first thing that freezer burns [dries out] which makes turning them harder without busting them.
It can be done but I always refused to mount anything that was much over a year old.
If you just want to tan them it is still doable. You say "cleaned" does that mean they've been washed or have they been fleshed? If they've been fleshed and shaved they should still be ok.

 

[AT Hiker]

Like bigtex said, freezer burn will be an issue. If you have an old school freezer that loads up with frost/ice it might not be bad. The newer ones literally freeze dry.


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[LanceS4803]

Thanks guys. It is a good freezer, but the bags were just folded, not sealed tight. So, I'll just have to take 'em out.
Not fleshed, just meat removed and blood cleaned off.

 

[Mike Belt]

AT... Speaking of freeze dried... you have any experience with that? At one time I thought about investing in one of those units for small game.

 

[AT Hiker]

AT... Speaking of freeze dried... you have any experience with that? At one time I thought about investing in one of those units for small game.

No I dont, I do get a lot of request to work on pets and freeze drying those smaller ones is the way to go. Just to weird for me.


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[JArender]

freezer burn is nothing but dried skin .... if your are tanning them you will have nothing to worry about. I once did an elk hide for a lady who's husband placed it in an unsealed bag for 9 years, it had a ton of freezer burn and had to be injected with a stop rot solution( I'm not sure if stop rot is still produced or not, the guy who came up with it is no longer with us due to complications substained from a slip on some ice) but if you are tanning it you could probably inject salt water if it was a bad spot ... stop rot could be brushed onto dried spots too( the elk had spots as big as a basketball, came back from tannery as fresh looking as one killed that week and tanned) ...All I needed was to get them soft enough to do a rough fleshing so I could salt dry them to send to a tannery. The tanneries deal with salt dried rock hard skins everyday( look up rehyrdration on taxidermy.net) if you are self tanning in a submersible tan then that will take care of any small freezer burnt spots

freezer burn is a simple fix. I use to laugh at guys who turned it away...I got to charge a little more and it was a easy fix esp with stop rot.

I dont post here any longer and I dang sure don't do taxidermy any longer, ( i went from full time 10-12 years or so to pt for 5-6 and I simply lost interest and the disorient have to deal with people then my freezer died while I was on a month long vaca one july. Only lost two customers fish thankfully, I offered replicas to them and I guess they said piss on it as I never heard back)

but i wanted to basically say don't let a little freezer burn scare ya.

 

[AT Hiker]

Stoprot is a life saver for sure. Its still produced.


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