How to Euro mount sheep horns.

Yukon Mike

Yukon Mike

Well-known member
Remember the old days when you had to find how to stuff on forums instead of well edited videos on youtube? Those youtube videos sure make fixing/building stuff easier nowadays eh? Anyways, here's an old school how I do sheep skulls for your info-tainment.

Step one, get the horns off and make the skull into clean white bone. I boil the skulls without letting the water touch the horns, then leave it a few weeks until the horn sheath starts to compost and pry them off with flat screw drivers. They will stink, bad. Then the skulls soak in a container filled with rainwater and whatever natural bacteria are floating in the air for a few months. That really stinks. Lately I have been using a plastic cooler with an aquarium heater in it wrapped in insulation to be able to do this in the winter outside. When they are done, they smell like septic tank, so I rinse them in hot water and then soak them in a solution of peroxide and water, somewhere between 3% and 10% solution. After about 3 days they look like this, and smell like clean bone.

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Meanwhile the horns are filled with borax and left to dry for a few months.

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I find the horn fits back on the core better if I nip the tips off.

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Next, I get the last two inches or so of the core wet and apply gorilla glue, jam the horn on tight and tack it with two flooring nails.

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Set 'er upside down to let the glue do its thing and that's about it.


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Thanks,

Mike
 
Well, next time I shoot a ram down here in Alabama, I will know what to do with the skull!! :)

Cool stuff, kinda spookie looking with the horns off.
 
Some guys up here that DIY their rams prefer to drill the horn holes first so that they can get the correct position when sticking them back on. I have seen a few head mounts where horn location was not marked and too much of the tips were cut off allowing for the horns to be tilted way back making the ram into a cartoon with the ears above the horns.

A local taxidermist I've had work on some of my stuff uses a stock tank heater for his maceration system. Works well for the winter soaking.

That ram on the right...heavy mass.

Playing the usual game "guess this ram's age" I am saying 11 years old for the one on the right, and 8 for the one on the left. It might be 9. Image is kind of blurry.
 
I'm with you Ray on the pale ram, I think he was 8. The heavy one I call 12, the biologist said 13, and the hunter said 11. Really hard to say on those dark horns, and how much was broomed off. It was a white sheep with a white tail living in an old burn with a bunch of Stone's. Very unique ram. His teeth were really worn but with all that good regrowth he was fat and healthy looking, except for the chest wound. : )

You never know Carl, I'm doing a farm goat skull up right now for a guy. I guess he really liked that goat or something.
 
Hey Mike, I was thinking the same thing that Ray mentioned about the heavy set ram. What were those quarter measurement starting with the bases? Beautiful set of horns.
Al
 
Hi Al, you know I don't recall the measurements on that one. I think it had 15" bases, but the rest is a blank.
 
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