What does *just* a beetle cleaning entail?

Beetle clean-only euros include all tissue removal + one flash degrease cleaning. This service is $200 with a 4-8 week turnaround time. Though not required, I HIGHLY recommend carrying out the degreasing process afterwards, which is very easy and I am happy to explain to you further. We are not accepting elk this season unfortunately.

A true, quality skull cleaning needs to go through two phases to achieve the best appearance and standard possible. Recent methods have developed other than just boiling a skull (which damages the bone). If perfect appearance doesn’t matter to you, or you’d like to degrease your skull on your own, this would be the perfect option for you. Anyone who is simmering or boiling is damaging your trophy. To learn more about skull cleaning, continue reading below:

Step 1: Tissue removal

There are three types of ways to remove tissue. Flesh eating beetles, maceration, and boiling. Using beetles is the most gentle method of removing flesh. Maceration is a bacterial removal; almost equally as gentle, but produces a smell that’s 10x worse. Boiling can remove tissue, but boiling also removes collagen from bone, leaving the bone damaged and more prone to crumbling + flaking. It also opens up the pores of the bone and traps the animal’s fats + grease deep inside the bone, making it harder to remove, which also causes yellowing on possible odor later on.

Tissue removal via beetles takes about 1 week.

Step 2: Degreasing

After tissue is removed from the bone, there is still be residual grease that lingers inside the skull. The downsides to leaving grease in bone are staining in appearance, yellowing, and possibly a very slight odor if you hold your nose close. These factors don’t bother a lot of people, but to some, they do.

Degreasing on average takes about 4 months. For greasier animals, up to 8 months. We are not offering full degreasing at this time as we are low in space in our degreasing tanks. We like to offer this service as a base, since beetle cleaning is the most gentle of methods + produces the highest quality bone.

And as an optional Step 3: Some folks like their skulls to be whitened. A lot of boilers will boil + whiten their skull, which for the first few weeks makes the skull look decent, but after time, apparent damage will surface.

This service still produces a significantly better skull quality than boiling does. We care most about quality and like to be 100% transparent on processing, even if appearance doesn’t matter much to you. We applaud those who seek knowledge for the best outcome possible, so if you have any questions, please reach out any time.

Please text/call (971)-494-7309 to schedule a drop off. We are located at 1428 SE 140th ave Portland OR 97233. Happy hunting!